Our Climate Fix Must Be Big and Quick

The politics of Resentment

As posted on Paul Krugman's blog:January 2nd, 2009 5:57 pm

 

Re GOP strategy: Racism isn't a good fit. But Resentment is (and it sure fits with the party of whiners).

Fits with the stripe of Red voters in 2008 from east Texas to West Virginia, where there are lots of poor whites resenting their traditional inferiors getting ahead.

Fits with all of the anti-gun-control sentiment that the GOP exploits.

Fits with the appeal to the self-made millioniare types. People will work much harder to avoid losing a million than they will to make a million in the first place (see Psych 101). To rally them to the GOP flag, call taxes "confiscation."

You could argue that the anti-Choice movement is a reflection of stirred-up resentment against "elite" advise.

Ditto the climate change deniers appeal of the GOP, denial being choaked by resentment against scientists presuming to know what's best.

Racism Politics just doesn't have the explanatory power of Resentment Politics, and it avoids the objection that Bush's appointments as both Governor and President were rather inclusive, compared to what nyou might expect for a southern politician. I'd agree that their appeals were sometimes racist but I see the general strategy as a more universal appeal to those who feel that some got ahead of them, or someone is going to tax their income.

— William H. Calvin, Seattle

The need for really big carbon sinks

While there are many good reasons to plant more forests, they are too vulnerable to drought. We cannot count on trees that could easily burn or rot. Anoxic sinks for biomass would be far more secure. Photo¬synthesis already removes large amounts of CO2 and, at the other end of the carbon cycle, CO2 is released by respiration and cell decomposition (combustion, rotting). It would suffice to keep atmosphere-bound carbon from reaching its destination.

I hope that President Obama will take a broad look at climate fixes, not just assign DOE to clean up energy and DOT to clean up transportation. While fossil fuel emissions are what has gotten us into climate trouble, it does not follow that fixing them will get us out. Reducing emissions does nothing to reverse either ocean acidification or our present climate problems. Until we create enough new carbon sinks to begin reducing the excess CO2 in the air, our problems will only get worse.Biomass—corn stalks, sewage, sawdust, switchgrass, and such—can be buried to effectively take CO2 out of the air. But, except for capturing the CO2 from coal burning, all of the climate talk in DC seems to ignore carbon sinks. When actually removing CO2 from the air is mentioned, it gets relegated to something to do after we clean up emissions. And since that is something that will take a century to accomplish, we are in serious "too little, too late" territory.

In short, we cannot start small and ramp up in the manner once proposed for "emissions wedges." We must think big about new carbon sinks as the world needs to sink about 25 billion tonnes each year, half to counter current emissions and commitments and half for drawing down CO2 concentrations within decades.

For a safety factor, we must front-load our climate response, much as a course of antibiotics may include a double dose the first day. That’s what it takes to back out of the danger zones for climate change and ocean acidification that we have blundered into, despite 50 years of serious scientific alerts.

The Unthinkable Happens

 

·         “I am shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here,” the police chief told Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca (1942)[1].

·         “No one could have conceivably imagined suicide bombers burrowing into our society and them emerging all on the same day to fly their aircraft--fly US aircraft into buildings full of innocent people and show no remorse,” President Bush said five days after the attacks[2].

·         "Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders' equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief," Alan Greenspan told the U.S. Congress during the meltdown of 2008.

There are various reasons for shocked disbelief. For the fictional police chief, it was humorous hypocrisy (as he spoke, the croupier was handing over his winnings). For President Bush, it could have been a failure of imagination (though since a 1994 Air France hijacking aimed at the Eiffel Tower, such possibilities had been a hot topic). Perhaps, given how he had ignored his own counter-terrorism experts, he was hoping to deflect criticism about how he had failed to protect and defend the United States. But why should a Federal Reserve chairman have found a bank meltdown unthinkable?

      The Reaganesque ideology about the magic of the marketplace and the evils of government intervention was Alan Greenspan channeling Ayn Rand. Greenspan firmly believed that the financial industry could regulate itself because of the banker’s self-interest in minimizing risk to their company (and their shares of stock). Layer this atop the conventional wisdom about the pricing seesaw of supply and demand, and you’d think that market collapses wouldn’t occur without a big push from the outside, such as pandemic disease or war. For internal reasons, market crashes ought not to happen. Yet, ever since the tulip mania of 1637, bubbles just keep popping, knocking down both fools and innocent bystanders.

      The gold standard for understanding stability and free-fall is encountered in the first few weeks of freshman physics. It starts with a balanced seesaw (a scale) but soon you get to things that move, such as pendulums and falling apples. When you lean back too far in a chair, a tipping point is passed and a simple blackboard diagram shows you how to prevent it, as you see in one of those bottom-weighted toys that automatically rights itself after a playful dog knocks it over. The economists have analogous examples but they still have difficulty with cycling, free-fall, and stimulating a recovery.

      One reason is skittishness, because even if the government gives banks the money to loan, or the consumer money to spend, their instincts are to hoard it against a further downside. (Fortunately, government spending can get the job done more quickly.)

      Another difficulty is reaction time, as when a new government bureaucracy first has to be invented before distributing the bailout billions. Just as it takes at least a quarter-second to hit the brakes after seeing the child run in front of you, even a successful stimulation of the economy may take more than a year to gain traction. In the meantime, what will prevent a run on the bank, foreclosures, job loss, bankruptcy, and much anxiety? Such knock-on effects were spread out over a few years following the 1929 market crash. These days, everything is faster—except the reaction time—and a financial folly in one country can now infect the world: Fail Locally, Collapse Globally.

       Now that the prospect of another Great Depression has concentrated our minds, consider how all this affects our climate threat (and talk about a slow reaction time: this is the 50^th anniversary of the first big warnings). The magic of the marketplace in carbon credits is being touted as the appropriate response.

      In the last fifty years, we’ve seen killer heat waves, a big step up in droughts, and a tenfold increase in floods and fires. The cause of both ocean acidification and global warming is primarily fossil fuel CO2 emissions—yet eliminating the cause will not eliminate the problem. It may surprise you to learn that no amount of emissions reductions will keep climate from getting worse. It’s literally a derivatives problem: what counts is the amount of excess carbon in the air, but emissions are merely its time derivative: they’re talking about reducing the rate at which carbon is added, not about reducing the accumulation.

      Until we start taking carbon out of circulation in a big way, climate problems will only get worse—perhaps suddenly.

      For example, we are already well into the danger zone for “Burn Locally, Crash Globally.” The Amazon rain forest could burn down as it was threatening to do in 1998 and 2005. In 1998, the Southeast Asian rain forest got into drought trouble at the same time, thanks to the big El Niño. The loss of both would boost the excess carbon in the air by half, causing an abrupt climate shift globally. On top of that, the loss of leaves would mean that the annual bump up in atmospheric carbon could increase by half, creating a deadly spiral even without an emissions increase.

      Our failure to engage on abrupt climate change has an sobering resemblance to what Alan Greenspan said when asked about preventing a housing bubble from collapsing. He answered that he never anticipated home prices could fall so much. "I did not forecast a significant decline because we had never had a significant decline in prices," he said. In short, if the seesaw has never broken before, why take precautions?

      But for climate, the risk concerns the biggest vulnerabilities of all: a mass extinction of species and a collapse of civilization. An abrupt climate shift would cause wave after wave of climate refugees. We could suffer a human population crash featuring famine, pestilence, war, and genocide. Our ability to back out of this danger zone depends on quickly sinking massive amounts of biomass every year.

      How do we succeed should resource wars begin, shattering international cooperation? How do we act effectively if world economies can be weakened so easily? It looks to me that we must rush to fix the climate problem before civilization becomes too weak to act effectively.

William H. Calvin is a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle and author of “Global Fever: How to Treat Climate Change” from the University of Chicago Press (2008).

wcalvin@u.washington.edu
http://WilliamCalvin.org

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[1]  http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Casablanca

Rick: How can you close me up? On what grounds?

Renault: I'm shocked, shocked to find that there is gambling going on here!

Croupier: Your winnings, sir.

Renault: Oh, thank you very much.

[2]  Transcript of ABC News Special Report (September 16, 2001 3:21 PM ET) at http://www.lexisnexis.com/us/ .

Get-rich-quick Memo to the Oil Barons

 

Oil barons really know how to dig holes in the ground. And they need a better place to put their money than trying to confuse the public about how serious global fever has become. I think they are missing a old-fashioned business opportunity, and a giant one at that.

Drilling wells is exactly what deep geothermal energy is all about: drill down 5 km, pressure-fracture the rock down there, then drill another well into the fracture zone.

At that, they are the experts. The other use of this technique, invented at Los Alamos in 1972, is what the oil barons ought to be embracing: Aim for granite that is dry but hot. Push water down one well, harvest the steam up the other. Then run an old-fashioned steam turbine to generate electricity for the plug-in hybrids.

Works anywhere on earth, though some places will require fewer or shallower wells. Hot Fractured Rock goes under various names such as heat mining; it's nothing like the traditional geothermal plants situated at hot springs.

How extensive a resource is deep geothermal? For the U.S., the experts said it could yield a thousand times more than our present overall energy use. How polluting? Close to zero. 

Geothermal energy from EGS [enhanced geothermal systems =Hot Rock Energy with engineered fracturing] represents a large, indigenous resource that can provide baseload electric power andheat at a level that can have a major impact on the United States,while incurring minimal environmental impacts. With areasonable investment in R&D, EGS could provide 100 GWe ormore of costcompetitive generating capacity in the next fiftyyears. Further, EGS provides a secure source of power for the longterm that would help protect America against economicinstabilities resulting from fuel price fluctuations or supplydisruptions. Most of the key technical requirements to make EGSwork economically over a wide area of the country are in effect,with remaining goals easily within reach.

—The MIT panel’s 2006 report, entitled “The Future of Geothermal Energy: Impact of Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) on the United States in the 21st Century.” 

[See chapter 19 in my GLOBAL FEVER: How to Treat Climate Change at http://global-fever.org/ch19.pdf for more.] 

 

So as the oil barons start to see themselves as in the energy business instead of the petroleum biz, one would think that expanding deep geothermal would be a logical direction for their capital. After all, it’s their deep drilling and stimulation technology that is making heat mining possible.

It's perfect for the Oil Barons. They see themselves in the business of drilling wells and fueling cars. And that's exactly the business they would still be in, except for mining heat to make the electricity that fuels the plug-in hybrid cars and trucks.

But there's a big difference. No pollution. And no additions to the insulating blanket of CO2 that is destroying our climate.

The future ain ’t what it used to be.

This aphorism by Yogi Berra, the Baseball Hall of Fame philosopher, used to be a funny example of a tangled arrow of time. But now it means that, thanks to global warming and ocean acidification, our kids and grandkids cannot have the kind of future that we had; they can count on a future of high risk, both directly from climate change and from the regional collapse of civilization.

People take sensible precautions when the risk is high. Ask a roomful of people if they have fire insurance. Almost all will raise a hand. Ask how many have had a fire in the last ten years, and almost none will respond. Yet people pay for insurance because, should a fire happen, they could lose everything—and still have to pay off the mortgage.

But uncertainty is another matter. Those with money to loan will worry about ever getting it back, and so loan rates will soar.

Insurance companies will simply stop insuring some things--currrently coastal real estate in Florida--making it even more difficult to get a mortgage.

Climate change has a very high procrastination penalty that just grows and grows with each passing year of inaction—rather like what happens if you don’t pay off your credit card. But for climate, there is no such thing as a fresh start from bankruptcy.

We need to innovate in a hurry and, considering our reputation for technological innovation, it’s odd that the U.S. has fallen behind.

• Many U.S. geothermal installations are imported from Israel. Though the Hot Rock Energy concept was invented in 1972 at Los Alamos, the action is now in Europe and Australia.


• The U.S. hasn’t started a nuclear plant since 1978. The French and Japanese are now the most experienced. The French electricial utility will help build, and is a major investor in, the U.S. nuclear plants in the pipeline.


• The Germans have become the innovators in “green” buildings.


• The Japanese and the Germans have more experience with solar power panels, though innovative thin-film photovoltaic from the U.S. is starting to make a difference.


• Think of wind turbine innovations and Spain, Denmark, and Germany will come to mind.

To my surprise, there are now Italian windmills back home in Kansas! The largest Italian utility company is building a big wind farm near Hayes, Kansas to sell clean electricity to the coal-dependent American Midwest.

Countries that innovate early get the new jobs, developing an economic edge over the C-free laggards that end up having to later import the technology.

One reason we have a standing army is in case we are surprised. Now we must provide something similar for climate surprises. We need the resilience to bounce back when something unexpected hits.

We also must have a good safety margin. We routinely have safety margins in support strength or fire resistance. No architect would design a stadium without calculat­ing the weight of the fans packing those bleachers—and then, for safety, doubling the number. Actually, it’s the noncritical components that have a safety factor of two. For components whose failure could result in substantial financial loss, serious injury, or death, a safety factor of four or higher is common. Yes, that’s more ex­pensive, one reason why building collapses are common in countries where building inspectors can be bribed to ignore skimping on the materials.

For climate protection, we need a safety margin in schedule. Our response needs to make a lot of progress up front, just as insurance against something as unexpected as, say, a fire in a rain forest.

We’ve only got one habitable planet and we dare not shave our margins.

Avoid the Optimal

 All sensible species avoid living on the edge. But as the world’s temperature goes up a few degrees in the course of the present century, many will be pushed over.

      We humans, if I am to judge from the thermostat settings, prefer room temperatures up in the mid-70s [24°C]. All species have an environmental temperature that they prefer–but it is always less than the optimal temperature for making a living and raising offspring. Why is “cool it” so important?

      All species have a range of temperatures in which they can live. Near the edges, they get into trouble. Population numbers fall as raising offspring becomes difficult. This band of acceptable environmental temperatures is broad for species in the temperate zones of the world. Tropical species can afford to specialize in a narrower temperature range because they are not often exposed to anything else.

       But possible and desirable temperatures are different. You’d expect, recalling whatever you’ve learned from economics or evolution, that a species would prefer to live in a band of temperatures that straddles the peak of the curve, the optimal temperature for gaining weight and producing offspring. However, put the animal in the optimal temperature and it will soon seek out cooler places. The entire band of desirable temperatures is cooler than the peak of the species’ fitness curve.

      That curve, you see, isn’t bell-shaped but skewed, dropping steeply as it gets hotter than the optimum. Several degrees beyond the optimum gets into scary territory. The species may not be avoiding the optimum so much as staying well away from the drop-off cliff. 

     So some species may be better off with a small temperature rise–they will be nearer their optimum– but in big trouble as the temperature rises further. Evolution could adapt a species to a warmer world but it takes time. A few million years ago, the world was warmer but it was a very slow warming. It didn’t jump up to the new temperature in only one century. 

     Speed matters.       

In Search of a Clean Gigawatt

I recently stood next to an electrical generator, big enough to power a city the size of Seattle (about 1,000 megawatts, known as a gigawatt). It was surprisingly small, no larger than a classroom with a tall ceiling. 

       The generator’s spinning shaft could be seen where it connected to the steam turbine, next in line. And backing it up were three more turbines, helping to keep that long shaft spinning at 1,800 revolutions every minute. 

       The generator doesn’t spin freely because every electrical light and appliance in that gigawatt-sized city is resisting it. It takes a lot of push from the four steam turbines to keep it up to speed. Some power plants create the steam in a boiler heated by burning coal, others by using nuclear fission of uranium-235 to generate the requisite heat. The cleanest method of all is harvesting steam from water sprayed on hot granite a few miles [5 km] underground.

      But standing in the electricity half of the power plant, you cannot tell what the heat source is. All you see are the big steam pipes coming in at the far end of the giant hall from an adjacent building. Looking out the big open doors, however, two giant cooling towers are immediately visible.

       Nuclear? Not necessarily, as many coal-fired plants also have them. They are used for any steam power plant that cannot use a big body of water to cool the used steam back to hot water, so that it can be reused, flashing again into steam when re-exposed to the heat source, again spinning the turbine.

      That wastes about two-thirds of the heat running the boiler; only one-third goes into electricity. Those hollow cooling towers transfer the waste heat to the air and what escapes from the top of the chimney is the mist formed within. But some nuclear plants–say, the Browns Ferry plant in Alabama–lack cooling towers because they are allowed to heat up a river or reservoir instead.

         To see where the steam pipes are coming from, you can walk out on the balcony, where it is much cooler. There are no tall smokestacks in sight. And the balcony is relatively clean. So there are no coal- or oil-fired boilers nearby. (Turbines run by natural gas, like the ones in aircraft engines run by jet fuel, don’t need steam as a middleman. )

       So the heat source nearby must be either nuclear or geothermal. How does Sherlock Holmes decide?

       First, sniff the Tennessee air. There is no smell of sulfur or suggestion of hot springs. Most existing geothermal plants are exploiting underground hot water not far from the surface and so most are built near hot springs.

       The lack of sulfurous odors doesn’t eliminate the possibility that it’s a geothermal plant—it might be a new deep geothermal plant. The oil industry’s deep drilling techniques allow the earth’s internal heat to produce the steam. Drill two nearby wells [5 km] a few miles down into hot dry granite, pump water down one and steam comes shooting up the other. Run it through a steam turbine and then recirculate it. It’s clean and simple.

      But I can easily eliminate the deep geothermal possibility. That’s because of the guard towers. They stand like giant long-legged insects inside a razor-wire fence. Unlike those at a maximum-security prison, they guard a compound against assault from outside. If this were a geothermal plant, it wouldn’t need a small army of guards carrying automatic weapons, wearing camouflage uniforms with a patch saying “Pinkerton Government Services.” 

     There are two heavily built buildings attached to this [blue] electrical hall. The nearest one does indeed contain a nuclear reactor, Watts Bar Number One, that is producing all the heat for the steam that spins that classroom-sized generator. The second building’s reactor won’t come on line until 2012, about thirty years late.

      Nuclear power plants generate three-fourths of all carbon-free electricity in the U.S.; the rest is mostly hydropower whose expansion possibilities are very limited. Even with the recent expansions, wind and solar yield less than one percent of the clean energy.

      Given our urgent need to avoid catastrophic climate change as the Earth heats up, we are going to have to build many gigawatt-scale power plants that use clean energy. Yet the scale of wind farms and solar plantations is only a fraction of a single power plant like this one. A monster solar trough array, like the one in the Mohave Desert in California, is still only 400 megawatts peak. Averaged around the clock, you are lucky to get one-fourth of that. It’s the same for wind: most of those modern windmills for electricity produce only 1 megawatt max. To get a thousand times as much, a gigawatt, would require an enormous footprint and, for 24-7, a huge amount of energy storage capacity.

    I cannot believe that we are going to get a clean 24-7 gigawatt out of wind or solar anytime soon, nor add a few gigs every week. Even if we stopped expanding our energy use, there are more than a hundred new coal-fired plants on the drawing board in the U.S. And it will take a new gigawatt every week in order to retire our 700 gigawatts of existing fossil fuel plants.

    That leaves nuclear and geothermal to fill the gigawatt gaps. Deep geothermal has the smallest footprint (no mining, no storage, few guards) and, being relatively old-tech, it is suitable for developing countries with unstable governments. (Once the wells are drilled, it’s just another steam plant operation.) 

     People keep talking about the climate crisis as if it were merely a long-term problem to be tackled by gradually reforming commuters, substituting better cars and cleaner fuels, building better houses and power plants. That’s a half-century time scale. Unfortunately, much quicker action is needed—before 2020—and it must also ensure that developing countries do not repeat our mistakes by burning their own coal and oil.

      While every clean megawatt counts, what we need are gigawatt-scale projects for all new construction, plus a rapid replacement of coal-burning plants. The only clean-energy prospects in the gigawatt range are nuclear and deep geothermal—and only one of them is suitable for most developing countries.

William H. Calvin is a professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle and the author of Global Fever: How to Treat Climate Change (University of Chicago Press, 2008).                   1085 word DRAFT for an op-ed.

 

And for something completely different, my video clip of a (simulated) safety shutdown of a nuclear reactor. I've been getting up to speed on nuclear power and took a field trip.

An Intelligence Test for Our Times

Thanks to upsetting our climate with a series of low-tech practices such as cutting down forests, tilling the soil, and—worst of all—burning fossil fuels, we are now facing a use-it-or-lose-it intelligence test.

The outlook is for a higher fever, with droughts that just won’t quit. Extreme weather will keep trashing the place. Tipping points may lead to demolition derbies, as when the Amazon rain forest burns or major cities are inundated.

Absent effective treatment of climate disease, the students of today will face an unpleasant, chaotic future—not merely hotter summers. Unless we get our act together very quickly—the next ten years—and on a global scale, our legacy could be genocidal downsizing.

Yet all we hear about is a low-carbon energy diet over the long haul: conserve energy, emphasize renewable energy, fill the car’s tank less often, and substitute clean solar, wind, nuclear, and geothermal for the fossil fuels.

Are such measures quick enough? No. Reliable enough? No. Can they head off the developing world from repeating our mistakes? No.

Even a zero-carbon diet, while good generic advice for prevention—it might have sufficed, back before our forty wandering years of denial and delay—is now going to be too little, too late. To keep CO2 from rising, sources and sinks must be in balance and there are no longer enough leaves and algae to do the sinking job. Only an equivalent of kidney dialysis now stands a chance of reversing climate disease in time.

We must create new CO2 sinks to offset the remain-ing sources and the lost sinks, then—as in dialysis— restore our climate by removing the CO2 accumulation. In short, negative emissions. Since most new forests will be plagued by drought and fire, we will have to encourage the ocean’s algae to sink more CO2.

Though we cannot bring back the species that are going extinct—and we could easily lose half—we should be able to reverse much of climate change. The problem is political inertia, not technology or science, and our window of opportunity is rapidly closing. The only good analogy is arming for a great war, doing what must be done regardless of cost and convenience.

WILLIAM H. CALVIN is a professor emeritus at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle. His forthcoming book is Global Fever: How to Treat Climate Change from the University of Chicago Press.

674 words. {DRAFT for an op-ed]

Don ’t Sleep Alone!

My father ran a medium-sized insurance company in Kansas City in my youth and, when we were driving around town, he would point out accidents waiting to happen—say, leaving one’s bicycle sprawled across a path for someone to trip over in the dark. A more subtle form of foresight is playing the percentages—and some improving percentages lead to my suggestion, “Don’t Sleep Alone!”

 Young adults mostly die, or become permanently disabled, from accidents. Later in life, heart attacks, cancer, and stroke become more common than accidents. Cancers are insidious but the three others strike without warning. They often require fast treatment to prevent permanent disability or death. How fast is fast?

 The chances of survival, for an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, are no better than 5 percent. Yet greater than 90 percent survive if a defibrillator resets the normal heart beat within a minute. For each minute that defibrillation is delayed, 10 percent fewer survive. By ten minutes, survival is dismal. Seattle now saves 45 percent of cardiac arrest victims, and Boston saves 40 percent. Los Angeles, however, is down at the national average—a mere 6 percent.

Things are improving as automated external defibrillators are housed in hallway cabinets with a red broken-heart sign. You grab it and run. Once AEDs were installed at O’Hare airport in Chicago, the survival rate jumped to 64 percent. The $1,000 AED analyzes the heart rhythm and automatically decides if and when to shock. They are very user friendly. In a study of mock cardiac arrest, it took untrained sixth-grade students a mere 90 seconds to do the right thing, only 23 seconds longer than trained personnel.

For strokes that plug an artery, there is now a clot-busting drug, TPA, but it must be given cautiously and in the first three hours after symptoms appear. That’s why you should call 911 for any sudden occurrence of neuro¬logical symptoms, such as disorientation or a weakened arm. Don’t just have someone drive you to the nearest hospital. Hospitals lacking a stroke center often take too long to get their act together. Properly trained medics will know which hospital to take you to—it may be across town.

But if you are wondering how your local medic services and hospitals rate when compared to best-practices standards, you can’t find it on the web. It still takes an enterprising reporter to pry loose the numbers from those hospital administrators who would prefer not to discuss the subject.

Even those unafraid of death (“Just like falling asleep”) are reasonably concerned with the other common consequence of too-little-too-late: permanent brain damage. There is a similar concern with the process of dying—say, lying around helpless for many hours hoping to be rescued. Senior living arrange-ments often feature an optional “door check” system but it is about like waiting for the maid to discover you in a hotel room when a heart attack, broken hip, or stroke has prevented you from reaching a phone. A cell phone helps but if you are unconscious, or leave it in your purse, or collapse while taking a shower, you may be stuck for a long time. For a friend of mine, it was 36 hours.

Fortunately, there is an excellent, low-tech solution: a companion who can notice problems and summon help. Just as you can avoid the hazards of hiking alone, you can avoid living alone and traveling alone. Since the long nighttime hours are more than a third of the total, the best single thing you can do to improve your chances is to share a bedroom with—literally—a roommate.

“Don’t Shower Alone!” was the bumper sticker of the 1970s California water shortage. The logical bumper sticker to promote playing the improved percentages is, of course, “Don’t Sleep Alone!”

WILLIAM H. CALVIN is a professor emeritus at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle. His forthcoming book is Global Fever: How to Treat Climate Change from the University of Chicago Press.

674 words. {DRAFT for an op-ed]

Climate interview, part 1

David Houle at EvolutionShift.com:  In this fourth installment of our on-going series of interviews with some of the leading thinkers and scientists on the subject of energy, we interview William H. Calvin, PhD.< I had the good fortune to meet Bill at the Future of Energy conference hosted by the Foundation for the Future several months ago.  I have also had the pleasure to read excerpts of his upcoming book “Global Fever: How to Treat Climate Change”, a book that could well become a classic as it frames the conversation and offers up a strategy and vision to effectively deal with Climate Change. He is the author of a dozen books, mostly for general readers, about brains and evolution. The latest is A Brief History of the Mind: From Apes to Intellect and Beyond .   

1.  Evolutionshift.com:  Bill, thank you for sending me a chapter of your new book: “Global Fever: How to Treat Climate Change”. When will it be published?

I’ll put that comparing-solutions chapter up on the web at Global-Fever.org. The book itself will be out in February by the University of Chicago Press. They did my other climate book (A Brain for All Seasons) which won several book awards..  What prompted you to write this book?The urgency of the situation. I figured that, as a newly emeritus medical school professor who has been following climate science since 1984, I could afford taking the three years to write it. Better that than taking a real climate scientist away from research and teaching time. And I felt that I had the right skill set. A Ph.D. in biophysics makes it easy for me to dig into both the physics and the biology involved. And thanks to talking shop with the neurosurgeons every day for twenty years, I do know something about when you can afford to wait and when decisive action is needed. 

      2.  Please define ‘Global Fever”?

Some people still think that global warming sounds cozy–but even they will recognize that a prolonged high fever portends dangerous consequences. A fever of two degrees above normal body temperature is very different from having three degrees of fever (in Fahrenheit, that’s at 104). In global warming, while two degrees C of fever above the 1990 temperature is bad, three degrees is terrible–a world full of climate refugees and, as they try to flee droughts and famines, there will be many genocides and wars. Who would lend money or write insurance in such an unpredictable world? The climate models say that we have to stop the annual growth in fossil fuel use by the year 2020 in order to avoid that three degree fate. 

3.       I love your phrase “Turning around by 2020”.  Please elaborate what that means and why you came up with such a catchy phrase?

It’s meant to replace “stabilizing” emissions–which is particularly misleading terminology, as it implies solving the problem. It only means stopping the annual growth in emissions; we’d continue to make things worse, merely at a constant rate. This is the most minimal of goals, which is why I instead talk of turning around the growth.“Emissions” also tends to frame things badly, blinding you to enhancing sinks for CO2 via forests, phytoplankton, and–if we’re lucky–artificial photosynthesis that mines the CO2 in the air. It’s balancing the sources and sinks that keeps CO2 constant. But you really want to reduce CO2 with net sinking. Even with zero emissions, we won’t have begun fixing the climate problem. Nature takes several hundred years to remove half of the excess CO2, thousands of years to get rid of the rest. We cannot afford to wait for that.My second goal is Sinking CO2 by 2040. That’s when enhanced sinks cancel out the remaining fossil fuel sources (aviation will need them for some time to come), and we finally start drawing down the atmospheric CO2. Until 2040, our climate problem will continue to get worse. In the decades that follow, we start reversing the desertification, extreme weather, and heat waves. Even if we get our climate back, the Amazon rain forest won’t come back nor will all the species that went extinct in the meantime – likely a third to a half of all species on Earth. Our ecosystems may well become fragile.My third goal is Climate Restoration by 2080, when we finally get CO2 concentration back down to its 1939 value.

 4.      Why the 1939 concentration?

It’s a personal goal: the year that I personally began adding to the CO2 problem. If we keep sinking more CO2 than we add, it might make sense to reduce it to the levels seen in 1750 before fossil fuels became popular. But the problem really goes back 8,000 years, to when our ancestors started clearing forests for agriculture. Losing sinks is just like adding fossil fuels to the air.

Climate interview, part 2

The timetable is really 2020?  That means that we must truly accelerate efforts on all fronts.  What can we do as individuals?
You can’t enjoy the long run unless you do the right things in the short run. We’ve only got a decade to make a big dent in fossil fuel use or deploy new carbon sinks in equivalent numbers. Anything slower means a disaster for today’s students.I don’t think we can advance on all fronts, given our 2020 emergency; we’d be better off spending our money on plug-in hybrids than on new rapid transit, for example. Reforming drivers worldwide takes too long.

A major makeover in a decade requires a lot of people working together, not separately. Individuals cannot do very much, in time for 2020, but they can–and must–persuade politicians to either get moving or retire. 

What must the government do?  When?I like Al Gore’s notion of eliminating payroll taxes (social security/medicare, unemployment; they’re the biggest part of withholding for most people) when a carbon fee kicks in to put a price on pollution.

This is really clever social engineering, not mere tax relief. Presently there are few ways to game the system and pay less taxes than your neighbor. But with the C-fee (a better phrase than carbon tax) in place, a more efficient car, better insulation, and car-pooling work like tax credits, not deductions. People love to game the system and the prospects of reducing their total taxes by a third will bring out all sorts of creativity that will reduce carbon emissions.
Second, it’s time to delegate substantial rule-making power to expert commissions. For example, the Federal Carbon Board might adjust the C-fee and emission caps, to ensure that national CO2 and smog goals are met, just as the Federal Reserve Board now adjusts the mortgage and credit card interest rates to ensure that inflation and unemploy­ment targets are met.  Third, we’ll need a Carbon “Makeover” Commiss­ion to man­date more efficient cars, trucks, planes, build­ings, appli­ances, and manufacturing processes. Some of the C-fee money needs to support the development of the longer-term technol­ogies, things that no company can currently under­take while remaining competitive. The commissioners will also need to quickly build demonstrat­ion projects such as deep-heat geothermal plants. They will need to make sure that oil and coal companies do not buy up the alternative fuel companies and then sit on their innovative patents until the clock runs out. This makeover opport­unity offers the largest, cheapest, and fastest lever­age on carbon emissions–which is why Congress cannot be left to deal with it, piece by piece. 

It seems to me that your time table makes sense, given the global warming situation.  I have always felt that most timetables are woefully inadequate to the point of seeming like proponents have their heads in the sand.  Care to comment?Talking endlessly to buy time – and continue the high profits from oil, coal, and natural gas a little longer – has been the lobbying strategy since 1966, just as it was for the tobacco companies after the Surgeon General’s report in 1964.

All sorts of sensible proposals for C-free energy had their budgets axed by Ronald Reagan in 1982 and the rest of the world pretty much did the same thing. It guaranteed that coal use would soar. Now we’ve run out of time for long-run strategies and we are forced to focus on 2020–not agreeing to do something by then, but accomplishing the turn around by 2020.

Climate interview 3: Hot Rock Geothermal

Please talk about Geothermal or, as you call it Hot Rock Energy.
  I find it fascinating and, quite frankly, have not heard much about this source of energy.  

It’s because “geothermal” has an image problem rather like electric cars once had. It took the success of a 1997 gasoline-electric hybrid called the Prius to help people think ahead to an all-electric car without defaulting to an image of a golf cart of limited utility, not suitable for the freeways. Hearing geothermal, we often pop up a mental image of a sulfurous hot spring and wrinkle our nose. Too many people think that geothermal is just piping near-surface hot water around to heat some buildings—say, Idaho’s State Capitol buildings in Boise. This in turn makes you think that geothermal electrical power is a special case, nice for Iceland but not more generally. That, however, is your grandfather’s notion of geothermal, badly out of date. See the report put out by a panel of eighteen experts that MIT assembled in 2006 to evaluate Hot Rock Energy as an industrial-strength solution for C-free electricity. The experts said it could yield a thousand times more than our present overall energy use. How polluting? Close to zero. The idea is not to find hot water. Instead you drill down until finding hot granite that is dry. Then apply water to make steam. Though the U.S. has been lagging behind, the Hot Dry Rock concept was invented by scientists working at the Los Alamos Nation¬al Laboratory in 1972. What comes up as dry steam is pumped right back down again as water, via a second well nearby. It forces through cracks in the granite, heats back up, flashes into steam, shoots up the other well to the steam turbine, which spins the electrical generator, which feeds the great electrical grid, which keeps your domestic climate com¬fort¬able and your car recharged.And how do these two wells connect? Such deep rock is already fractured along onion-like sheets, ancient planes of stress from sags and folds. Mineralization has mostly filled those cracks, but high-pressure injection can force water into them, dissolving the glue and opening up passages. When the high pressure is released, many do not reseal. Sometimes the layers shift a little, and the noise from such little earthquakes serves to locate the newly-opened crack. A map of the enhanced fracture zone is built up and, when it is several km across, the second (and sometimes a third) well is drilled into it to harvest the steam.Gushers and mud eruptions don’t come up out of the granite layers. If a sizeable earthquake fractures the well shaft, nothing happens—you just drill a new well nearby. That makes it much safer than drilling for oil or natural gas—or for storing CO2 where a leak could generate a catastrophic heat wave. There are so many obvious problems with “CO2 Capture and Store” (for example, it requires building 67 percent more coal-fired plants just because of the 40 percent efficiency hit) that I’ve concluded it is just another delaying tactic to continue the fossil fuel status quo for another thirty years.Deep geothermal is drought-proof (both hydro and biofuels could be shut down in the droughts that are forecast). Hot Rock does not involve a perpetual stream of truck traffic as biofuels and fossil fuels do. It is perhaps the least demanding on industry, except for manufacturing enough tall drill rigs. What’s built above ground after the drilling rig leaves is just a simple steam plant. A 100 megawatt plant would be smaller than a two-story parking garage. Operating it is within the competence of all developing countries, unlike nuclear or “clean coal” technologies. We’ve got to keep developing countries from burning their own coal or buying oil, yet still modernize–so we need to either drill them some deep holes or supply them with cheap electricity from nuclear plants in countries that already have them.

 9. What would be the Hot Rock timetable, to get enough to retire the supertankers and coal trains? What needs to be done to get us going in this direction?

There have been various research projects around the world since 1970 that have demonstrated the deep heat mining techni¬ques. Serious power product¬ion, however, is only getting started. In France, they are getting near-commercial-sized yields at depths of 4 to 5 km. There are some projects in southern Germany and northern Switzerland. Australia has quite a few proof-of-concept projects limping along on private money.

The only hesitation that I have about Hot Rock Energy for 2020 is that there is simply not enough experience with it yet, compared with the experience of running hundreds of nuclear plants over fifty years time. Even though merely combining two tested techniques, deep drilling/stimulation and steam power plant, there will be beginners’ errors to discover. We must do that quickly.< The capital costs per megawatt-hour are similar to those of a new coal plant. They are mostly drilling costs, which ought to fall with a real market for drilling services. Indeed, until opening up those fractured rocks in the depths with the initial hydraulic injection, you don’t know what size power plant to order for the well head. That might cause private capital to hesitate, suggest¬ing a proper role for government money to do the initial Deep Heat farms and then sell the good ones off to industry.

If I were the 2020 czar, I’d place an order for twenty deep drilling rigs and fund fifty Deep Heat farms in order to find the beginner’s errors and the efficient combinations. We urgently need to know if Hot Rock Energy can be ramped up worldwide to thousands of units. That’s when we can start cancelling orders for more nuclear power plants.

Climate interview 4: Nuclear Power

11. What do you think about nuclear energy? Is it safe? How can it be utilized to reach your timeline goals?

Nuclear power generation is currently the major C-free energy source. It is over fifty years old, with an excellent safety record. It’s hundreds of times safer than hydro (dams fail) and thousands of times safer than fossil fuels. Unlike the other expandable C-free sources, most of the beginner’s mistakes have already been made. It took three decades before the efficiency doubled.

France has switched to nuclear for 78 percent of its elect­ric­ity. Hydro gives France another 13 percent. So France is 91 percent clean, 9 percent dirty—and Texas is the exact opposite. Texans now get 91 percent of their electricity from fossil fuels, almost twice the national average. Switzerland is 1 percent dirty and the U.S. is at 60 percent (electricity only; about 85 percent dirty counting transportation energy needs too).

If France and Switzerland switched their vehicles over to electrical power, they would serve as even better C-free energy models for the world. Much as I admire Denmark’s style of distribut­ed cogeneration and the move to renewable wind and solar energy, there simply isn’t time to scale that up around the world before 2020, given how many coal trains and oil tankers need to be retired.

Too much of the present discussion on climate protection is either pie-in-the-sky or envisages a slow evolution of urban architecture, commut­ing, energy, and civic virtue. We once had time for such planning. We can still explore on many fronts at once but for 2020 we need to be quickly building something foolproof. For the heavy lifting, that looks like Hot Rock geothermal and third-generation nuclear plants.

12. Any final thoughts or comments?

Even though China now emits more CO2 annually, the U.S. has contributed more, over the years, to the insulating blanket of fossil carbon than any other country (30 percent), yet still resists even baby steps toward energy reform. The rest of the world sees the U.S. as the 500-pound gorilla. (The other gorillas won’t go very far down a path until the big guy finally gets up and comes along.) A colleague of mine came back from an international meeting of climate scientists having over­heard someone say that, since he didn’t live in the U.S., he felt impotent to deflect the world from the road to catastrophe.

I’ve emphasized a quick technofix because the window of opportunity is closing on us and we’ve only got one planet to lose. Time is short. And because of starting late, we must get this right on the first try or we may be trapped in a runaway. That’s where we lose existing sinks for CO2 via baking the soil, closing the leaf pores, drought, fire, and ocean acidification. Some carbon sink regions turn into net sources, as when wood decay emits more CO2 than the remaining trees can recapture. We already see that in the tropical rain forests during an El Niño. That pushes up the fever and further accelerates the decay in topsoils, which add more CO2. This accelerates the temperature spike. Like the squeal of a public address system when the speakers are heard by the microphone, it just keeps building up, bringing most activities to a shrieking halt.

Climate change is a challenge to the scientists but I suspect that the political leadership has the harder task, given how difficult it is to make people aware of what must be done and get them moving in time. It’s going to be like herding stray cats, and the political leaders who can do it will be remembered as the same kind of geniuses who pulled off the American Revolution.

Copyright 2007 by William H. Calvin

My first science field trip

The 1955 Spooklight Expedition was over a long November weekend; no adults, just 16-year-old guys out to solve a mystery.  This 1997 Associated Press story explains the continuing attraction of the place: 

HORNET, Mo. (AP) – On those moonless Missouri nights when it gets darker than dark – darker, some would say, than the inside of a cow – things can get pretty spooky along a rugged stretch of road. That's when the Spooklight is likely to make its appearance.    On some nights it might rise slowly out of nowhere to illuminate a broad swatch of farmland.  On others it might simply waltz up East Highway 50 from Oklahoma, dancing across the gravel road that doubles as the state line.

    Or it could just run straight at you, vanishing at the last second, then reappearing a heartbeat later, as it sneaks up from behind to levitate around your shoulders.

   Whatever it is, just about everyone along this stretch of rolling hills and farms has a Spooklight story to tell.

 What the AP reporter fails to mention is that this road is also the local lover’s lane.  Teenaged boys love to take teenaged girls to scary movies (they cling, wonderfully), and we suspected the spooklight might have been conveniently exaggerated for such reasons.  We were the ghost busters, a noble calling.

       The first night, we didn’t see much until pockets of fog began to form near our observation post.  When a car, bouncing up the series of small hills, briefly illuminated one nearby fog patch and then another, it looked like the flitting-around version of the spooklight.  None of the girls we knew would have been fooled for a minute but, with a willing suspension of disbelief, it was a lively ghost.

       The spooklight was more commonly seen in the distance, when looking west down the long straight country road, which went rolling slowly downhill over a half-dozen hilltops to a minor river, with a long flat stretch farther to the west.  On that distant plain was the famous Route 66 (since demoted to Highway 50).  A long straight stretch of that highway aligns with the east-west spooklight road, suggesting that the spooklight is only the distant headlights from the eastbound traffic.  But line-of-sight posed a problem; the topographic maps made it look as it the intervening hilltops would block the headlights.

       The next night was clearer, and we got the telescope in place well before sunset.  As dusk faded, we saw a spooklight emerge, straight down the road, hovering somewhat above the still-backlit intervening hilltops, fluctuating in intensity and often disappearing.  Our scout car drove miles west toward the spooklight, shining signal lights back in our direction at each hilltop.  No fog that night, so it looked as if there were two versions of the spooklight.

       Over the two-way radio came word that our scouts could easily see the lights on Route 66 across the river, and from the hilltop where we could see them.  And through our high-power reflecting telescope, we could now separate the spooklight into some component parts:  a vertical string of blurry lights surrounded by a luminous fringe, like the moon has on a humid night.  When our scouts reported eight cars on Route 66, we could see eight spots within the shimmering spooklight.  When they saw three, we saw three.  And so it went all evening.  We even saw brake lights flashing at one point.  When the spooklight seemed to loom larger for a few minutes, it was only because there was a long line of cars waiting to pass a slow-moving truck, many miles to the west.

        Authoritative maps could be wrong!  (Valuable lesson, that.)  We could indeed see all of the way west from the spooklight road in Missouri to Route 66 in Oklahoma, thanks to our elevated location and the straight line of sight from clearing for the road.  In the daytime, this view is hidden by the horizon haze and humidity.  Though the spooklight is said to date back to before cars were invented, fires in the flatland should produce a similar spooklight – and fire is still used to clear the fields for the next planting.

       Young Scientists 2, Ghosts 0.  Our ghost-busting expedition was written up in the Kansas City Star as a nice feature with photographs.  (Needless to say, as you can verify by searching for “Missouri Spooklight” on the web, a good ghost story never dies, no matter how often it is disproved – there are too many reasons to keep it going.  Indeed, the web has only spread its fame and ice cream vendors will surely converge on the scene and form a Spooklight Chamber of Commerce.)

The Climate Optimist, part 1

Mention global warming at a social gathering and see what happens, now that skepticism and glib comebacks have turned into concern and sorrow. People will, of course, assume that you’re a pessimist about our prospects.
     “Not really,” I protest. That earns me a quizzical look.
     “Wait a minute,” she says. “If you’re an optimist, why do you look so worried?”
     Dramatic pause.
     “So you think it’s easy, being an optimist?”
Many scientists look worried these days. We’ve had a steady diet of bad news coming from climate scientists and biologists. To become even a guarded optimist, you have to think hard.
     First, I reflected, the history of science and medicine shows that, once you mechanistically understand what’s what, you can approach all sorts of seemingly unsolvable problems. I’m optimistic that we will learn how to stabilize climate.
     When pessimism tempts me, I usually remember the progress that I’ve seen. When I was born in 1939, antibiotics were just a rumor, there were few vaccines, and your chances of dying from an infection were three times higher than they are now.
     I’ve seen an enormous increase in our knowledge about how bodies work, from molecules to mind. The average lifespan has been extended by decades in many countries, just in the time that I’ve been personally observing the scene as a medical school professor. And in the first half of the 20th century, deaths from infections dropped by an order of magnitude even before antibiotics and vaccinations came to dominate the scene . Just the basic knowledge about how diseases spread was what did most of the job, not a needle. Once this new knowledge was incorporated into everyday practices, eight out of ten fatal infections were prevented. We’re used to thinking of science discoveries leading to technological innovation. But here you see how knowledge, pure knowledge, pays off all by itself.
     The reason I’m not so pessimistic about climate is that, once you understand what’s what, you can approach all sorts of seemingly unsolvable problems. It is reasonable to hope that we will learn how to intervene and stabilize things in the decades ahead, much as we earlier did in medicine. (To be continued.)

How to treat climate change

That's the subtitle for my book, GLOBAL FEVER, out in February 2008 from U of Chicago Press. I’m more optimistic than most for the long run, say 2100, provided that science and technological creativity stays high and unincumbered. But we’ve got to manage the short run – to 2020 – on a more urgent basis to avoid inflicting catastrophes on today’s students, going with what we’ve got rather than pie in the sky.  Just to illustrate, here is a three-part solution using existing technology, mostly with known economics

1. Hybrids with a 33 mile daily range on electric – the average commute – could eliminate foreign oil imports which have grown to be 2/3 of our oil supply, for which we’ve fought two wars in the mideast.
2. We could clone the most modern nuclear reactors to reduce coal use. France gets 78% of its electricity from nuclear, NJ 52%. 
3. But developing countries will burn their own coal to modernize, so the developed world has to undercut that with subsidies, running low-loss power transmission lines across half a continent from one of the 31 countries that already has nuclear power. 

So it’s an interlocking three-part course of action to stop the growth in fossil fuel use – maybe there are better ones, but it shows that we already have the technology to make a big dent in the problem. It's only political willpower that is the barrier. Once we turn around emissions growth before 2020, then we turn around CO2 growth itself, then we pump down the CO2 concentrations to the point where climate change reverses. Sea level will continue to rise, and extinct species will remain gone forever, but the extreme weather and desert encroachment ought to reverse. 

Because we need something surefire, I think we are stuck with placing orders for five times as many nuclear plants as we now have in the U.S. We can always cancel some if other clean power ramps up quickly enough.  But we would have to increase wind-solar-geothermal by 100x to do the same job 5x nuclear would do. Nuclear electric is a 50 year old mature technology that we know will work (as is the DC powerline technology). There are no such guarantees for doing anything 100x in ten years on an industrial scale. 

For the long run, we will simultaneously need to stimulate technological innovation for eventually using some form of solar and low-loss transmission lines, to improve energy-wasting architecture and urban planning, and stimulate civic virtue. But neither such things nor the traditional "green" virtues will solve the 2020 problem in time. 

What a difference six months can make

Yes, I have neglected the blog -- and for a six month period that has seen public opinion on fixing climate change evolve quite a lot in the U.S.

It's a period when I've started giving climate talks to any civic group that will listen. What's Happening for 15 minutes, What To Do for 15 minutes.  And between them, as time permits, 15 minute segments on Sea Level Rise and on Abrupt Climate Changes such as El Nino and droughts. I'll be posting the powerpoint slides soon.

GLOBAL FEVER 101

These illustrations from my book (out in early 2008 from University of Chicago Press)

                 GLOBAL FEVER: How to Treat Climate Change

may be freely copied with attribution. All have been remade in black-and-white to make handouts inexpensive.

William H. Calvin University of Washington

1. What’s Up                           (Climate change over the last 50 years)


2. Sea Level Rise                    (Greenland ice, coastal flooding)


3. Abrupt climate change   (Abrupt climate shifts: Droughts, El Niño, ocean currents)


4. That's Cool!                         (Changing fossil fuel use, future CO2 levels

Each handout corresponds to a 15-minute segment of the talk that I have been giving to civic groups. Each includes a reading list on its last page. If you would like a scientist to come speak to a group about climate change, just ask.  At the University of Washington in Seattle, the Department of Atmospheric Sciences, the Climate Impacts Group, and the Program on Climate Change are all good at arranging for speakers. For the latter

Miriam Bertram, Coordinator
Program on Climate Change 
University of Washington
Seattle WA 98195-5351
         206-543-6521   UWPCC@U.Washington.edu         

 

Even the Insurance Journal

The insurance industry is one of the few major economic sectors that has fully realized the perils of inaction in combating climate change. Reinsurers, especially Swiss Re and Munich Re, employ staffs of scientists full time to analyze the problems and find solutions. However, the industry can't do it alone. If Stern's report is dismissed as a Cassandra like prophecy of doom, and no action is taken, not only will the industry be hard pressed to survive, but also the entire planet. Cite.

The FT ’ s summary

Now if only the WSJ had the brains of UK's Financial Times.

Climate change is one of the most serious issues facing the planet. Scientific evidence shows that temperature changes are likely to have profoundly negative consequences for human society, the global economy and the world’s natural systems. This poses risks and opportunities to which investors and companies must respond.

 

clipped from DarkSyde

Stern by the numbers

The level in the atmosphere of carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas, stood at 280 parts per million by volume (ppm) before the Industrial Revolution, in about 1780. The level of CO2 in the atmosphere today stands at 382ppm 

£200bn, or 1 per cent of global GDP, must be spent every year to get carbon dioxide levels to "stabilise" at 550ppm.

This figure will rise as world GDP increases, and could be three to four times as large by 2050

40 per cent of the world's species would face extinction if temperatures rose by 2C

200 million people are at risk of being driven from their homes by flood or drought by 2050

6C is a "plausible" estimate of how much world temperatures could rise by the end of the century if greenhouse gas emissions are unchecked

60 million more Africans could be exposed to malaria if world temperatures rise by 2C

35 per cent drop in crop yields across Africa and the Middle East is expected if temperatures rise by 3C

200 million more people could be exposed to hunger if world temperatures rise by 2C

550 million more people could be at risk of hunger if world temperatures rise by 3C

4 million square kilometres of land, home to one-twentieth of the world's population, is threatened by floods from melting glaciers

35,000 Europeans died in the 2003 heatwave, an event likely to become "commonplace"

4 billion people could suffer from water shortage if temperatures rise by 2C

Finally, the economists ’ weigh in

This from Sir Nick Stern, formerly chief economist at the World Bank and current advisor to Tony Blair:

The science tells us that GHG emissions are an externality; in other words, our emissions affect the lives of others. When people do not pay for the consequences of their actions we have market failure. This is the greatest market failure the world has seen.

followed by

[Business as usual] involves very high risks; it is likely to imply a rise of 4-5°C or more above pre-industrial levels within the next 100 or 150 years. This is way outside human experience. At high levels of warming, less is known about how the climate will respond – very large events might happen….
                What are the costs and benefits of taking action? The costs of removing most of that risk, getting to 550 or below, are around 1% of [global] GDP per year. The cost could be above or below 1% depending on policies, technological progress and ambitions but would be in this region. This is equivalent to paying on average 1% more for what we buy - the price rise for carbon intensive goods would be higher and for low carbon intensive goods would be lower – it is like a one-off increase by 1% in the price level. That is manageable; we can grow and be green.

 and UK politicians listen. This from Tony Blair

The consequences for our planet are literally disastrous. This disaster is not set to happen in some science-fiction future, many years ahead, but in our lifetime. What is more, unless we act now, not some time distant but now, these consequences, disastrous as they are, will be irreversible.

 

the Nobel Prize economist Joseph Stiglitz

The question is not whether we can afford to act, but whether we can afford not to act [on climate change]. To be sure, there are uncertainties, but [it is clear] that the downside uncertainties—aggravated by the complex dynamics of long delays, complex interactions, and strong non-linearities—make a compelling case for action.

---

http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/media/986/EB/Stern_Review_Quotes.pdf

AAAS president John Holdren on climate skeptics

To be credible, the handful of “skeptics” about human causation of current global climate change would need both to explain what alternative mechanism could account for the pattern of changes that is being observed and to explain how it could be that the known human-caused buildup in GHG is not having the effects predicted for it by the sum of current climate-science knowledge (since, by assumption, something else is having these effects). No skeptic has met either test. 

John Holdren, “The energy innovation imperative.” Innovation, p.11 (Spring 2006).