The framing of this circle on the ground
Brings whirlwinds, tempests, thunder and lightning
There was more than one Faust. The name, which means ‘the fortunate’ in Latin, was used by German magicians much as conjurors today might call themselves ‘the magnificent’ or ‘the incredible’. But we know which one he was. In 1513 in Erfurt a Conrad Mudt heard an ‘immoderate and Foolish Braggart’ describe himself as the ‘demigod from Heidelberg’.2 His name was ‘Georg Faust’. In 1528, a ‘Jörg Faust’ was thrown out of the town of Ingolstadt, and in 1532 a ‘Dr Faust, the great sodomite and necromancer’ was denied entry to Nuremberg.3 People were plainly afraid of him. When he died in Wärttemberg in 1540 or 1541, the locals claimed that the Devil had taken him home.
After his death, his story began to spread, and in 1587 an amplified version was published by an anonymous theologian in Frankfurt.4 Two years later it was translated into English as The History of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus. This was the source for Christopher Marlowe’s play The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, which appears to have been written in 1590.
Marlowe tells the story of a brilliant scholar, ‘glutted… with learning’s golden gifts’,5 who reaches the limits of human knowledge. Bored by terrestrial scholarship, he plots, by means of necromancy, to break into
… a world of profit and delight
Of power, honor, of omnipotence.6
When, he believes, he has acquired his demonic powers, spirits will fetch him everything he wants:
I’ll have them fly to India for gold,
Ransack the ocean for orient pearl,
And search all corners of the new-found world
For pleasant fruits and princely delicates.7
So Faustus draws a circle and summons the Devil’s servant, Mephistopheles. He offers him a deal: if the Devil will grant him twenty-four years in which to ‘live in all voluptuousness’,8 Faustus will, at the end of that period, surrender his soul to hell. Mephistopheles explains the consequences, but the doctor refuses to believe him.
Think’st thou that Faustus is so fond to imagine
That, after this life, there is any pain?
Tush, these are trifles and mere old wives’ tales.9
So the bargain is struck and signed in blood, and Faustus acquires his magical powers. With the help of a flying ‘chariot burning bright’, he takes a sightseeing tour around Europe. He performs miracles. He summons fresh grapes from the southern hemisphere in the dead of winter. After twenty-four years, the devils come for him. He begs for mercy, but it is too late. They drag him down to hell.
If you did not know any better, you could mistake this story for a metaphor of climate change.
Faust is humankind, restless, curious, unsated. Mephistopheles, who appears in the original English text as ‘a fiery man’,10 is fossil fuel. Faust’s miraculous abilities are the activities fossil fuel permits. Twenty-four years is the period – about half the true span – in which they have enabled us to live in all voluptuousness. And the flames of hell – well, I think you’ve probably worked that out for yourself.
In 1590 the economy was powered largely by wood, water, wind and horses. The English did burn some fossil fuel: we know, for example, that in 1585 London imported about 24,000 tons of coal.11That coal would have provided as much energy as the United Kingdom now consumes in half an hour.*
Liquid fossil fuels were not to be widely used for almost three centuries. Europe was submerged in the Little Ice Age: temperatures were one to one and a half degrees cooler than they are today. Science, with a few exceptions, was a muddle of alchemy, theology and magic. If man-made climate change had taken place by then, the people of the sixteenth century would have had no means of detecting it.The Tragical History of Dr Faustus is not an allegory of climate change. But the intention of the poet does not affect the power of the metaphor. Our use of fossil fuels is a Faustian pact.
To doubt, today, that manmade climate change is happening, you must abandon science and revert to some other means of understanding the world: alchemy perhaps, or magic.
Ice cores extracted from the Antarctic show that the levels of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere (these are the two principal greenhouse gases) are now higher than they have been for 650,000 years.14,15 Throughout that period, the concentration of these gases has been closely tracked by global temperatures.16
Carbon dioxide (CO2) levels have been rising over the past century faster than at any time over the past 20,000 years.17 The only means by which greenhouse gases could have accumulated so swiftly is human action: carbon dioxide is produced by burning oil, coal and gas and by clearing forests, while methane is released from farms and coal mines and landfill sites.18
Both gases let in heat from the sun more readily than they let it out. As their levels in the atmosphere increase, the temperature rises. The concentration of carbon dioxide, the more important of the two, has risen from 280 parts per million parts of air (ppm) in Marlowe’s time to 380 ppm today.19 Most of the growth has taken place in the past fifty years. The average global temperature over the past century has climbed, as a result, by 0.6° centigrade.* According to the World Meteorological Organization, ‘the increase in temperature in the twentieth century is likely to have been the largest in any century during the past 1000 years’.20
If you reject this explanation for planetary warming, you should ask yourself the following questions:
1. Does the atmosphere contain carbon dioxide?
2. Does atmospheric carbon dioxide raise the average global temperature?
3. Will this influence be enhanced by the addition of more carbon dioxide?
4. Have human activities led to a net emission of carbon dioxide?
If you are able to answer ‘no’ to any one of them, you should put yourself forward for a Nobel Prize. You will have turned science on its head.
But the link has also been established directly. A study of ocean warming over the past forty years, for example, published in the journal Science in 2005, records a precise match between the distribution of heat and the intensity of manmade carbon dioxide emissions.21 Its lead author described his findings thus:
The evidence is so strong that it should put an end to any debate about whether humanity is causing global warming.22
This sounds like a strong statement, but he is not alone. In 2004, another article in Science reported the results of a survey of scientific papers containing the words ‘global climate change’.23 The author found 928 of them on the database she searched. ‘None of the papers,’ she discovered,
disagreed with the consensus position… Politicians, economists, journalists and others may have the impression of confusion, disagreement, or discord among climate scientists, but that impression is incorrect.24
In 2001 the Royal Society, the United Kingdom’s pre-eminent scientific institution, published the following statement:
Despite increasing consensus on the science underpinning predictions of global climate change, doubts have been expressed recently about the need to mitigate the risks posed by global climate change. We do not consider such doubts justified.25
It was also signed by the equivalent organisations in fifteen other countries.*
Similar statements have been published by the US National Academy of Sciences,26 the American Meteorological Society,27 the American Geophysical Union28 and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.29
Until 2005, there was one remaining line of evidence permitting some people to claim that manmade climate change could still be disputed. A study of satellite measurements conducted in 1992 by the atmospheric scientists Roy Spencer and John Christy found that part of the atmosphere (the lower troposphere) had cooled over the preceding thirteen years.30 This, in a warming world, should not have been possible. In 2005, three separate studies showed that the data had been misread.31,32,33 Professor Christy admitted that his results were incorrect and agreed that the atmosphere had warmed. As the author of one of the studies pointed out,
there is no longer any data contradicting the predictions of global warming models.34
Already sea ice in the Arctic has shrunk to the smallest area ever recorded.35 In the Antarctic, scientists watched stupefied in 2002 as the Larsen B ice shelf collapsed into the sea.36 A paper published in Science concluded that its disintegration was the result of melting caused by a warming ocean.37 The global sea level has been rising by around 2 millimetres a year,38 partly because water expands as it warms, partly because of the melting of ice and snow.
Almost all the world’s glaciers are now retreating.39,40 Permafrost in Alaska and Siberia, which has remained frozen since the last Ice Age, has started to melt.41,42 Parts of the Amazon rainforest are turning to savannah as the temperatures there exceed the point at which trees can survive.43 Coral reefs in the Indian Ocean and the South Pacific have begun to wilt. The World Health Organization estimates that 150,000 people a year are now dying as a result of climate change, as diseases spread faster at higher temperatures.44 All this is happening with just 0.6° of warming.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a committee of climate specialists which assesses and summarizes the science, estimated in 2007 that global temperatures are likely to rise by between 1.8 and 4.0° this century, with a possible maximum of 6.4°.45 Some climate scientists have come to believe that this range is too low: one study, for example, published in 2005, for example, suggests that the maximum possible temperature rise which could be caused by a doubling of carbon dioxide concentrations is 11.5°.46 An increase as big as this, however, is very unlikely.
But even a much smaller rise is likely to cause great harm to some human populations. Professor Martin Parry of the UK’s Meteorological Office estimates that a rise of just 2.1° will expose between 2.3 and 3 billion people to the risk of water shortages.47 The disappearance of glaciers in the Andes and the Himalayas will imperil the people who depend on their meltwater, particularly in Pakistan, western China, Central Asia, Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia.48,49 As rainfall decreases, there are likely to be longer and more frequent droughts in southern Africa, Australia and the countries surrounding the Mediterranean.50 In northern Europe, summer droughts and winter floods will both become more frequent. Very wet winters, for example, which until now have troubled us every forty years or so, could recur one year in every eight.51
The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation warns that
in some forty poor, developing countries, with a combined population of two billion… [crop] production losses due to climate change may drastically increase the number of undernourished people, severely hindering progress in combating poverty and food insecurity.52
The reason is that, in many parts of the tropics, crop plants are already close to their physiological limits. If, for example, temperatures stay above 35° for one hour while rice is flowering, the heat will sterilize the pollen.53 The International Rice Research Institute has found that rice yields fall by 15 per cent with every degree of warming.54
When I first read about this, I thought it equated to a formula for worldwide famine, and said as much in the Guardian. I was wrong to do so. Climate scientists, I later discovered, were confident that lower crop yields in some parts of the tropics would be offset by higher crop yields in temperate countries.55 In the cooler parts of the world, the productive season lengthens and both higher temperatures and higher carbon dioxide levels should allow crop plants to grow faster.
But now, I am sorry to say, it seems that I might have been right, though for the wrong reasons. In late 2005, a study published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society alleged that the yield predictions for temperate countries were ‘over optimistic’.56 The authors had blown carbon dioxide and ozone, in concentrations roughly equivalent to those expected later this century, over crops in the open air. They discovered that the plants didn’t respond as they were supposed to: the extra carbon dioxide did not fertilize them as much as the researchers predicted, and the ozone reduced their yields by 20 per cent.57 Ozone levels are rising in the rich nations by between 1 and 2 per cent a year, as a result of sunlight interacting with pollution from cars, planes and power stations. The levels happen to be highest in the places where crop yields were expected to rise: western Europe, the midwest and eastern US and eastern China. The expected ozone increase in China will cause maize, rice and soybean production to fall by over 30 per cent by 2020. These reductions in yield, if real, are enough to cancel out the effects of both higher temperatures and higher carbon dioxide concentrations.58,59
Another paper in the same journal pointed out that, as carbon dioxide levels rise, plants release less water from their leaves.60 This reduces local rainfall, which in many regions will have declined already because of climate change. The result, which has not been anticipated in the standard climate models, could be a further decline in crop production. It now seems possible that the world could be pushed towards famine.
The effects of crop losses are likely to be compounded by other problems. Though this prediction is controversial, some scientists suggest that, as temperatures rise, the incidence of malaria will increase. One study maintains that temperatures 2.3° higher than today’s will expose a further 180–230 million people to the risk of catching the disease.61 Diarrhoea and cholera are both associated with rising temperatures.62,63
If the earth warms by a moderate amount and sea levels increase by some 40 centimetres (roughly in the middle of the expected range for this century), the number of people in danger of saltwater floods caused by storm surges could grow from some 75 million (today) to around 200 million.64 As the sea rises, salt water will pollute the drinking water on which some of the biggest coastal cities – Shanghai, Manila, Jakarta, Bangkok, Kolkata, Mumbai, Karachi, Lagos, Buenos Aires and Lima – depend.65 In some cases, according to the International Association of Hydrogeologists, this problem could be big enough to necessitate the cities’ abandonment.66
The West Antarctic Ice Sheet contains enough water to raise sea levels by a further 3 metres,67 enough to inundate parts of New York, London, Tokyo, Mumbai, indeed of most of the world’s major cities. The ice sheet appears to be starting to disintegrate.68 There is great controversy about how long this process will take. The sheet is propped up by ice shelves extending into the sea, like a roof kept aloft by the walls of a house. If they collapse as the Larsen B did, the ice sheet could begin to slide into the ocean. No one knows how swiftly this would happen, but it is unlikely that the entire sheet could dissolve in less than 300 years. If just 10 per cent of it fell into the sea this century, the results would be catastrophic for many coastal peoples.
The IPCC says that there is evidence for ‘an increase of intense tropical cyclone activity in the North Atlantic.’69 In 2005 two papers, published in Science and Nature, suggested that the intensity of hurricanes had increased since the mid 1970s.70,71 It is not yet clear whether this is connected to climate change, though there is a relationship between the temperature of the sea surface and the strength of a storm.72 In March 2004 the first hurricane ever recorded in the South Atlantic hit the coast of Brazil.
The number of extreme weather events of all kinds appears to have quintupled since the 1950s, according to the insurance company Munich Re.73 The summer of 2003 seems to have been the hottest in Europe since at least the year 1500.74 Thousands of people in Europe and India died as a result of the heatwave. According to a paper published in Nature, human influence has at least doubled the chances of its recurrence.75 In northern Europe, however, the number of people dying because of extreme temperatures is likely to drop, as our winters become warmer.76
Other species will be hit sooner and harder than humans. In 2004 researchers on five continents surveyed the ecosystems covering 20 per cent of the earth’s surface. They found that, if temperatures rise to about the middle of the expected range, between 15 and 37 per cent of the world’s species are ‘committed to extinction’ by 2050.77 With just 1.4° of warming, the coral reefs in the Indian Ocean will become extinct.78 With 2°, some 97 per cent of the world’s reefs will bleach – which means the coral animals eject the algae which keep them alive, and are likely to die as a result.79 As increasing levels of carbon dioxide dissolve in seawater, the oceans will acidify. Their pH could fall from 8.2 to 7.7 by the end of the century,80 and by 2050 the water could become too acid for shells to form. This will be devastating to sea life, wiping out much of the plankton upon which the marine ecosystem depends. With 2° of warming, all the sea ice in the Arctic could melt in summer, killing the polar bears, the walruses and much of the rest of the ecosystem.81
In one of the most depressing papers I have ever read, researchers from University College London and the Met Office reported in 2005 that ‘the Amazonian forest is currently near its critical resiliency threshold.’ With just a small degree of warming ‘the interior of the Amazon Basin becomes essentially void of vegetation.’82
The problem is that the trees in some parts of the forest are responsible for as much as 74 per cent of local rainfall.83 As they start to die when the temperature rises, less water is released into the air by the forest. This has three effects: there is less rainfall to sustain the remaining trees, more sunlight reaches the forest floor (drying it and making the forest more susceptible to fires), and less heat is lost through evaporation. The rising temperature and decreasing rainfall kill more trees, and the chain reaction continues. It could happen soon and swiftly: ‘we suggest,’ the researchers say, ‘that this threshold exists very near to current climatic conditions.’84
The Amazon is the most biodiverse place on earth, but the problem does not stop with other species. It produces the rain which sustains much of South America. And trees, roughly speaking, are sticks of wet carbon. As they burn or rot – as they oxidize in other words – they turn into carbon dioxide. The Amazon has the potential to release 730 million tonnes of carbon – about 10 per cent of manmade emissions – a year for seventy-five years.85
This is just one of the means by which climate change begets climate change. A paper published in Geophysical Research Letters in 2003 predicted that, as a result of global warming, by about 2040 living systems on the land will start to release more carbon dioxide than they absorb. By 2100, it suggests, the surface of the earth will be emitting around 7 billion tonnes of carbon a year,86 which is roughly what human beings produce today. This is an example of ‘positive feedback’: climate change accelerating itself. Positive feedback was not fully considered by the Intergovernmental Panel on climate change in 200787, but has began to play a role in the panel’s new estimates.
One of the reasons why the terrestrial biosphere begins to release more carbon dioxide than it absorbs is that, as we have seen, plants in the tropics and even some temperate regions88 may shrivel or die when the temperature rises. But there are several others. Soil, for example, becomes a net source of carbon when temperatures rise, as the metabolism of the microbes it contains speeds up. This was not supposed to happen for several decades,89 but in 2005 British scientists reported that soils in England and Wales had already become carbon sources.90 The carbon dioxide they were releasing had cancelled out all the cuts that the UK had made since 1990. Before the end of the century, the world’s soils will eject the manmade carbon they have absorbed over the past 150 years.91
As the permafrost in the far north melts, it starts to release methane. The West Siberian bog alone, which began melting in 2005, is believed to contain 70 billion tonnes of the gas,92 whose liberation would equate to 73 years of current manmade carbon dioxide emissions.*
The National Center for Atmospheric Research in the US estimates that 90 per cent of the top 10 feet of permafrost throughout the Arctic could thaw by 2100.95 These positive feedbacks – and there are many more – extend the possible range of global temperatures. In doing so, they make a truly catastrophic event more likely to happen.
One such event has seized the imagination of people in northern Europe. The region is kept warm in the winter – relative to parts of the world at the same latitude – by the northwards transport of water from the Caribbean – a current known as the Gulf Stream. The Gulf Stream is part of a general oceanic circulation, which is mostly driven by the sinking of surface waters in the far north of the Atlantic. As they roll southwards over the seabed, they create the currents which, after a long journey, return to northern Europe, carrying heat from the tropics.
The reason they sink is that they are both cold and salty, and therefore denser than the waters beneath them. The phenomenon is known as ‘thermohaline circulation’, or THC. For at least twenty years, some oceanographers have warned that this sinking, and therefore the ‘overturning circulation’ (the deep ocean currents which drive the whole system), could either weaken or stop altogether because meltwater flowing into the Arctic seas would dilute the salty surface waters. If this happened, northern Europe could be reduced to tundra, while the tropics, as heat was not transported away from them, would become very much hotter. This has taken place before. As the northern hemisphere began to warm after the last Ice Age, the ice dam holding back a vast lake in North America burst. The freshwater thundering into the north Atlantic appears to have shut down the ocean circulation, with the result that temperatures in Europe fell by 5°. They did not recover for 1,300 years.
Many climate scientists believe that a total shutdown of this nature is impossible: there is simply not enough freshwater in the far north to prevent the surface waters from sinking.96 At most, a slightly weakened current might reduce the rate of warming in northern Europe. In July 2005, the British House of Lords examined the evidence for the possible impacts of climate change and concluded that ‘changes in the THC are not at all likely to occur, as we understand it, in the next 100 years.’97 This was a reasonable summary of the existing science.
Five months later,Nature reported
the first observational evidence that… a decrease of the oceanic overturning circulation is well underway.98
Researchers from the National Oceanography Centre in the United Kingdom claimed to have discovered that the circulation had in fact been weakening for fifty years, but that it had not hitherto been detected.99 It appears to have slowed down by 30 per cent.
At the same time, the overflow waters and in turn the deep waters of the North Atlantic have significantly freshened… Increased freshwater input into the Nordic Seas will initially weaken the circulation only slowly. But when a certain threshold is reached, the circulation may jump abruptly to a new state in which there is little or no heat flux to the north.100
If this occurs, it would have
devastating effects on socio-economic conditions in the countries bordering the eastern North Atlantic.101
But a major change this century still looks very unlikely. The possible switch from one stable state (a smoothly flowing Gulf Stream) to another (no Gulf Stream at all) is an example of what climate scientists call ‘non-linearity’. They point out that some of the earth’s systems are unlikely to respond smoothly to changes in the climate: they could flip suddenly from one condition to another.102
I have concentrated so far on the effects which could take place within the IPCC’s range of up to 6.4° of global warming. But there are, as I have mentioned, some climate scientists who maintain that the temperature this century could rise much further.
The Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen, having taken into account the falling levels of particles produced by heavy industry in the atmosphere, which have so far sheltered us from some of the sun’s heat, has made a rough estimate that the temperature could rise by between 7 and 10°.103 In 2005, British scientists published the results of a computer simulation larger and more detailed than its predecessors. It revealed that a doubling of carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere could lead to temperatures ranging anywhere from 1.9 and 11.5° above their pre-industrial levels.104 This does not mean that all temperatures in this range are equally likely – the extremes are much less probable than the temperatures in the middle – but the researchers found that none of them could be ruled out.105
So what happens if average global temperatures rise by more than 6°? There could be a historical precedent.
The Permian period came abruptly to an end 251 million years ago. In China, South Africa, Australia, Greenland, Russia and Spitsbergen, the rocks record the same sequence of events, taking place almost instantaneously.106 The marine sediments deposited at the time show two sudden changes. The red or green rock laid down in the presence of oxygen is replaced by black muds of the kind deposited when oxygen is absent. An instant shift in the ratio of the isotopes (alternative forms) of carbon within the rocks suggests a very rapid change in the concentration of atmospheric gases. On land, gently deposited mudstones and limestones give way to great dumps of pebbles and boulders.
The Permian was one of the most biologically diverse periods. Sabre-toothed reptiles hunted herbivores the size of rhinos through forests of tree ferns and flowering trees. Among the coral reefs lived great sharks, fish of all kinds and hundreds of species of shelly creatures. At the point at which the sediments change, 251 million years ago, the fossil record very nearly stops dead. The reefs die instantly, and do not reappear on earth for 10 million years. All the large and medium-sized sharks disappear, most of the shelly species, even the majority of the plankton. Among many classes of marine animals, the only survivors were those adapted to the near-absence of oxygen.107
Plant life was almost eliminated from the earth’s surface. The four-footed animals, the group to which humans belong, were nearly exterminated: so far only two fossil reptile species have been found anywhere on earth which survived the end of the period. The world’s surface came to be dominated by just one of these, which was about the size and shape of a pig. It became ubiquitous because nothing else was left to compete with it or to prey upon it. Altogether, some 90 per cent of the earth’s species appear to have been wiped out:108,109 this represents by the far the biggest of the mass extinctions. The world’s ‘productivity’ (the total mass of biological matter) collapsed.
These events coincided with a series of volcanic eruptions in Siberia; the eruptions which gave rise to the Siberian Traps. The volcanoes produced great quantities of two gases: sulphur dioxide and carbon dioxide. These gases appear to have caused the extinctions. The sulphur and other effusions caused acid rain, but would have bled from the atmosphere quite quickly. The carbon dioxide, on the other hand, persisted. The rising temperatures caused by the gas appear to have warmed the world sufficiently to have destabilized a super-concentrated form of methane which was found then (and is still found today) in large quantities in the sediments beneath the polar seas. The release of methane into the atmosphere might explain the sudden shift in carbon isotopes. The temperature rose by between 6°110 and 8°.111
Ocean circulation appears to have dropped, for reasons which will now be familiar to you, to about one twentieth of current levels,112 depriving the deeper waters of oxygen. As the plants on land died, their roots would no longer have held the soil and loose rock together, with the result that erosion rates greatly increased.
This does not mean that we can make a direct comparison between the events which brought the Permian to an end and the possible effects of manmade climate change today. Many of the plants on land were doubtless killed by acid rain rather than by high temperatures. Though some countries seem to be doing their best to replicate both conditions, sulphur emissions are much lower today than they were 251 million years ago. But it does give us an indication of the possible scale of ecological change a temperature rise of this magnitude could provoke.
Various other outcomes of climate change have been proposed, of which the most intriguing is one suggested by a reader of mine.
Thank you for drawing attention to the threat of global warming. I wish the world would wake up to how serious it is. If we don’t do something soon the whole planet could turn into a dessert.
This is a tempting prospect, but I regret to say that the science does not support it.
Curtailing climate change must, in other words, become the project we put before all others. If we fail in this task, we fail in everything else. But is it possible? Is it, as James Lovelock sometimes suggests,113 too late?
I don’t believe it is. We have a short period – a very short period – in which to prevent the planet from starting to shake us off. Our aim must be to stop global average temperatures from rising to more than 2° above pre-industrial levels, which means more than 1.4° above the current point.
Two degrees, because it has been widely recognized by climate scientists as the critical threshold,114,115 has sometimes been characterized as a ‘safe’ level of warming. As I hope this account has shown, it is merely less dangerous than what lies beyond. A conference of scientists convened by the UK’s Met Office warned that at less than 1° above pre-industrial levels, crop yields begin to decline in continental interiors,116 droughts spread in the Sahel region of Africa,117 water quality falls and coral reefs start to die.118 At 1.5° or less, an extra 400 million people are exposed to water stress and another 5 million to hunger,119 18 per cent of the world’s species will be lost120 and the ‘onset of complete melting of Greenland ice’ is triggered.121 There are, I am afraid, some effects of climate change which cannot be avoided.
Two degrees is important because it is the point at which some of the larger human impacts and the critical positive feedbacks are expected to begin. If we do not greatly reduce our emissions, temperatures are likely to reach that point in about 2030.122
My correspondent Colin Forrest, who is not a professional climate scientist but appears to have done his homework, argues his case as follows. Researchers at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact in Germany have estimated that holding global temperatures to below 2° means stabilizing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at or below the equivalent of 440 parts of carbon dioxide per million.123 While the carbon dioxide concentration currently stands at 380 parts, the other greenhouse gases raise this to an equivalent of 440 or 450. In other words, if everything else were equal, greenhouse gas concentrations in 2030 would need to be roughly the same as they are today.
Unfortunately, everything else is not equal. By 2030, according to a paper published by scientists at the Met Office, the total capacity of the biosphere to absorb carbon will have reduced from the current 4 billion tonnes a year to 2.7 billion.124 To maintain equilibrium at that point, in other words, the world’s population can emit no more than 2.7 billion tonnes of carbon a year in 2030. As we currently produce around 7 billion, this implies a global reduction of 60 per cent. In 2030, the world’s people are likely to number around 8.2 billion. By dividing the total carbon sink (2.7 billion tonnes) by the number of people, we find that to achieve stabilization the weight of carbon emissions per person should be no greater than 0.33 tonnes. If this problem is to be handled fairly, everyone should have the same entitlement to release carbon, at a rate no greater than 0.33 tonnes per year.
In the rich countries, this means an average cut by 2030 of around 90 per cent. The United Kingdom, for example, currently releases 2.6 tonnes per capita,*125 so would need to reduce its emissions by 87 per cent. Germany requires a cut of 88 per cent, France of 83 per cent, the United States, Canada and Australia 94 per cent.†126 By contrast, the Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change – the only international agreement that has been struck so far – commits its signatories to cut their carbon emissions by a total of 5.2 per cent by 2012.
These could be underestimates. The Potsdam Institute calculates that with the equivalent of 440 ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, there is a 67 per cent chance of holding the temperature rise to below 2°.127 Another study suggests that to obtain a 90 per cent chance of stabilization below 2°, you would need to keep the concentration below 400 parts per million – 40 or 50 parts below the current level.128 Because the carbon released now stays in the atmosphere for some 200 years.129 and causes climate change many years into the future, there is perhaps a 30 per cent chance that we have already blown it. We might already be committed to 2°.
But I am writing this book in the spirit of optimism, so I refuse to believe it.
Whether or not it is too late to hold global temperatures below the critical threshold, it is clear that the greater the cuts we make, the lesser the eventual impact will be. A 90 per cent cut should make the sort of warming that took place at the end of the Permian impossible. It is also clear that the sooner we act, the more effective the cut will be. There are several reasons for this, but the most obvious is illustrated by the two graphs on p. 18. In both cases we reach the target of a 90 per cent reduction by 2030, but in the second graph, where we delay the cut for longer, our total emissions are higher.
Two centuries after the Tragical History of Doctor Faustus was published, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe rewrote the magician’s story. In his version – Faust – the doctor’s bargain with Mephistopheles changes. He offers Mephistopheles his soul, but on one further condition: hell can have him only if he stops striving and succumbs to ‘smug complacency’.130
You heard me, there can be no thought of joy.
Frenzy I choose, most agonizing lust,
Enamored enmity, restorative disgust.131
Faust acquires his powers and performs his miracles, but he never relaxes. As the story progresses, he becomes less interested in living in all voluptuousness and begins pouring his demonic energies into other schemes. Towards the end of his life he starts planning a development project. He will create ‘room to live for millions’, sheltered
1. Fast carbon reduction 100
2. Slow carbon reduction
Carbon emissions as a percentage of the current total
from the storms and tides.132 He will use wave power to provide energy for them and human ingenuity to rescue land from the sea. He dies in the midst of his labours, and Mephistopheles is cheated of his prey. Angels descend and bear Faust’s soul up to heaven.
Faust, in other words, is redeemed by working, with frenzy and agonizing lust (and, I am sorry to say, a good deal of brutality), for the greater human good. While he still possesses his dark powers – his command of technology and labour, his ability to effect political and economic change – he uses them to create a world in which a free and comfortable society can persist. The gifts which threatened to destroy him are deployed instead to save him. This book seeks to explain how it might best be done.