Earth & Sky

Straight talk about climate change

Earth & Sky talked with climate scientist Jerry Mahlman last year. This is a good time to hear him again.

Salazar: Can we stop the climate from warming?

Mahlman: I was in Al Gore office when he was vice–president. He asked me, “If we could hold the emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere constant, would global warming go away?”

And I said, “If you were to hold the emissions constant, you would get up to eight times the carbon dioxide, or CO2, that there was before the Industrial Revolution. You would still be in a heck of a mess.”

Carbon dioxide results from burning fossil fuels, whether it’s coal, oil, natural gas, or even more exotic forms. And we have this problem that our population is increasing. Our demand for fossil fuels is increasing.

You just look at the United States, and the SUV phenomenon, all happening witlessly within the context of a problem that was identified very clearly and quantifiably more than 25 years ago. In 1979, the National Academy of Sciences essentially laid out why global warming is a problem.*

So this isn’t a new thing. All of this information has been put out there. The National Academy of Sciences and others have written many, many things about this. And, essentially, the governments of the world are choosing to do nothing. The largest offenders are the United States of America and Australia. Both are highly technical countries that have many gifts and much money and are not choosing to address the problem in any way whatsoever. That’s where we are.

I’ll tell you one of the horrifying facts of global warming, and why it is so inexorable. Suppose that you and I wanted – along with all the rest of the people in the world – to cut down on CO2 emissions so that they would be small enough to let us guarantee that the concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere next year, and the decade after, and the decade after, would not go up any more.

What would be your guess as to how much we would have to reduce our per capita consumption of fossil fuels to meet that goal? This is an intuitive question for you.

Salazar: Well, what you’ve described sounds pretty serious. It’s almost something like a war on carbon emissions, and I’d imagine war rationing to be, say, 50 percent of my consumption.

Mahlman: Well, it turns out that every person in the world would have to do that, only twice as good as that. You’d have to cut it by 75 percent.

That’s a horrific number if you think about everything that you do: whether it’s talking on the telephone, or diving our cars, or heating or cooling our homes. Think of everything that’s manufactured, energy used to extract metals, for example. So the answer is 75 percent, if the entire world were going to participate.

Salazar: What does a 75 percent cut in personal emissions look like?

Mahlman: You would have to have a radical change in your lifestyle.

In other words, we’re not taking the problem seriously. If we did, we would have a huge challenge making a dent into the problem. The system is hard–wired to produce more and more carbon dioxide, and to a degree other greenhouse gases, all of which are going into the atmosphere.

We need to be talking about what we’re going to do to arrest global warming – to keep it from happening, to keep it from warming – now. That’s the problem.

In fact, it’s worse than I talk about, because suppose that we’re able to produce the miracle – the absolute miracle – of reducing 75% in our emissions globally. Guess what? Over the next hundred years, the Earth would warm up another degree Fahrenheit, even though we produced that miraculous result.

What we’re really doing now is deferring all of the problem to the generations that follow us. And they will not have much access to fossil fuels, because we’ll have used up most of them. They’ll get all of the garbage, in terms of the increased warming of the planet.

There are enormous intergeneration equity issues that are going on here, right now. We get all of this dirt–cheap fossil fuel. We burn it all up, we screw up the planet with greenhouse gases, warm up the planet, warm up the ocean, and therefore have many manifestations that are negative. And nobody’s really talking about it.

The IPCC reports tell it all, and they consistently get ignored. The reason they get ignored – and this is not warm and fuzzy to talk about – is that it’s really hard to do something about it in a relatively short period of time, say over the next three decades. It’s really, really hard.

Salazar: So how do we start talking about global warming?

Mahlman: It’s easy to focus on what regular people can do. But regular people don’t have their hands on the buttons that have to be pushed in order to change the way that we produce goods and services for all humans on Earth. That’s the problem.

You’ve got to be able to begin to say, “What are the proactive actions that you take?”

And the point is, that nobody’s taking that seriously.

We’ve been on an energy binge. The binge will continue because of the momentum. It’s huge.

Now part of the problem is that when you start to put together education programs, there’s a barrier. Because the things that we scientists are saying are so intolerable that there’s actually incentives to ignore what we’re saying. I’m presenting the basic facts in a way that are almost never reported in the media. And yet, you read the IPCC” report. And there it is in its stark form.

*Climate Research Board (1979) Carbon Dioxide and Climate: Scientific Assessment, Washington, D.C., National Academy of Sciences, 22 pages.

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