Getting serious about the new realities of global climate change

Abstract

For two decades, the central challenge facing climate-change policy makers involved efforts to control emissions of carbon dioxide. While diplomats looked at many different global-warming pollutants, they designed rules that mostly focused on carbon dioxide. Unfortunately, those efforts have largely failed, which has created yet another difficult challenge for the global community: how to manage the severe impacts of a warming world. New diplomatic strategies are needed. Diplomats must work harder on pollutants other than carbon dioxide—such as soot—that will be easier to regulate and can help build credibility in the international diplomatic regime. New science shows that soot and short-lived climate pollutants actually cause almost half of current global warming—much more than thought just a few years ago. Fortuitously, these pollutants are also relatively easy to manage, and success on this front will help catalyze the political support needed for the much more difficult, yet essential, task of making deep cuts in carbon dioxide. At the same time, the authors write, new thinking will be needed on how to help societies adapt, such as building networks of experts and local officials who are on the front lines of adaptation.

Since 1989, diplomats from around the world have been working to craft agreements to manage the threats associated with global climate change. Their efforts have produced the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. The central obligations under the original Kyoto treaty expired in 2012, but late last year many countries agreed to extensions out to the year 2020. A new round of talks is also under way to develop yet another treaty. Along the way there have been numerous communiqués, initiatives, and other grand-sounding programs aimed at mitigating the emissions that are now changing the global climate in increasingly visible ways.

While diplomacy hasn’t been in short supply, it hasn’t had much practical impact on the rate of emissions. Worldwide, carbon dioxide and other greenhouse-gas pollution is at its highest level ever. Emissions of all these gases in 2010 were 31 percent above 1990 levels and still rising, even though emissions would need to be cut 50 to 80 percent over the next few decades to stabilize the climate (JRC/PBL, 2011). The world’s energy and agricultural systems—the main causes of human emissions of warming gases—are pointed severely in the wrong direction.

The countries that agreed to make substantive cuts in emissions under the original Kyoto Protocol accounted for just 60 percent of world emissions; by the time the treaty was ratified, however, that number fell to less than one-quarter. The new, extended Kyoto treaty covers just 14 percent of world emissions. ¹

Worse, most of the few areas of apparent progress are illusions. Across the industrialized world, governments are celebrating the fact that emissions are now declining slightly. Much of that achievement, however, stems from factors like the collapse and restructuring of Eastern Europe or the unexpected appearance of cheap and clean natural gas from shale in the United States—developments that have no relationship to treaties on global warming. Few countries have intentionally made substantial cuts in emissions, and no major economy is even close to being on track for cuts between 50 and 80 percent. Even the paragons of greenery are doing less than meets the eye to address a problem they consider extremely serious. For example, since 1990, emissions from Britain have declined by one-fifth, but that big reduction disappears when emissions from all the products that Britons import are considered. Such “displacement” of emissions is rampant—approximately one-quarter of global carbon dioxide emissions are embodied in traded goods (Davis et al., 2011). Climate treaties specify that nations report emissions occurring only within their own sovereign borders, but such national accounting games do not change the global calculus. That is, globalization has made it harder to get serious about climate change because it has made it easier for nations to shift emissions to those countries where limits are more lax.

Meanwhile, many emerging economies have been growing rapidly, mainly powered by the most emission-intensive of all fossil fuels: coal (Victor and Morse, 2009). Indeed, most future projections suggest that all growth in emissions will come from these countries. The International Energy Agency in Paris, for example, projects that 60 percent of emissions growth between now and 2035 will come from one coal-intensive country alone: China (IEA, 2012). Looking at such forecasts, the rich industrialized countries blame developing countries for their failure to restrain their emissions; the developing countries blame the industrialized world for failing to acknowledge its historical responsibility for most of the warming societies are committed to today. Neither wants to take the lead without the other. In all this diplomatic gridlock, the only clear fact is that the climate is warming and poised to get a lot warmer.

It is time to face new realities and shift strategies

Two decades ago the central challenge for policy makers was to coordinate efforts to control emissions. They failed. That challenge remains, but now there is a new one: managing the economic and social risks of unchecked climate change that have emerged because the world missed the chance to act early. Getting serious about these twin challenges will require a new mind-set. It will also require engaging new actors in the policy process.

Efforts are needed on two fronts

First, diplomats must fix the central problem in international climate talks: low credibility. There’s no question that climate change is one of the hardest problems that the international community has ever faced (Victor, 2011), but international negotiators have unwittingly made a difficult problem even more so by focusing heavily on one pollutant: carbon dioxide. While it is true that the Kyoto treaty covers multiple pollutants, what countries actually emphasize when monitoring and reporting—that is, the accounting system that governs the Kyoto caps—are long-lived pollutants, particularly carbon dioxide. Those choices reflected good intentions at the time. However, while no climate solution is possible without solving the problem of carbon dioxide, the seemingly exclusive emphasis on this greenhouse gas has diverted attention from other ways in which near-term progress to slow climate change is possible.

The politics of getting to long-term solutions requires tackling a cruel logic. Carbon dioxide lasts more than a century in the atmosphere (and when dissolved in the oceans lasts 1,000 years) (Solomon et al., 2009). Any program to cut carbon dioxide will be expensive, since most carbon emissions come from burning fossil fuels and alternatives aren’t ready at scale. And even if those big costs are paid, there will be no tangible impact on climate warming for decades. Societies, as a general rule, aren’t good at tackling problems that have high immediate costs, require sustained effort over decades, and provide few tangible benefits to those who must first bear the costs.

Boosting credibility therefore requires focusing on parts of the climate problem where reasonably quick, tangible success is possible. Some opportunities to do this exist. Over the past few years, scientists in San Diego—working with colleagues around the world—have suggested a strategy to achieve visible results in a few years: launch an aggressive program to tackle soot and other short-lived climate pollutants (Molina et al., 2009; Shindell et al., 2012; Victor et al., 2012; Wallack and Ramanathan, 2009). It has become clear that these pollutants—soot in particular—play a much larger role in changing the climate than was thought five years ago (Bond et al., 2013; Jacobson, 2001; Ramanathan and Carmichael, 2008; Ramanathan and Feng, 2008). Slightly less than half of current global warming is due to four categories of non-carbon dioxide pollutants: dark soot particles often called black carbon, methane gas, lower atmospheric ozone, and hydrofluorocarbons (industrial gases used as coolants). Nearly all have life spans of a few weeks to a decade, much shorter than carbon dioxide. Yet they are potent warmers. Emitting one ton of black carbon, for example, has the same immediate effect on warming as emitting 500 to 2,000 tons of carbon dioxide.

A second front in a new climate-policy strategy—adaptation—is also essential. Reducing emissions largely fails without international coordination, but the politics of adaptation to the effects of climate change is quite different. Almost all adaptation is a solitary act. Each country or city or neighborhood can make the calculus on its own. Whether San Diego builds seawalls, nourishes its beaches to compensate for sand lost to higher seas, or improves wildfire management is mainly a calculation that San Diegans make (San Diego Foundation, 2012). The costs are incurred locally, and so are the benefits.

For years it has been taboo to talk about adaptation because advocates for climate mitigation feared that adaptation signaled defeat; once politicians started bracing for climate change, they wouldn’t focus on mitigation (Pielke et al., 2007). This “can’t walk and chew gum” theory of politics has always been wrong and yet is very popular among analysts and activists because it leads to simple advice for politicians. (It has also been applied to short-lived climate pollutants—to this day, many advocates for action on carbon dioxide abhor discussion of short-lived pollutants based on the warped logic that those pollutants will distract politicians from the need to cut carbon dioxide.)

These amateurish theories fail to take into account that politics isn’t a zero-sum game. Decades of failed diplomacy have done little but foster disbelief in the possibility of success in fighting climate change. And pretending that adaptation is not a looming challenge has just made the impacts of climate change even more dangerous for unprepared societies.

Getting results with short-lived climate pollutants

The perennial failure to get much done in climate diplomacy is now feeding on itself. When major diplomatic events like the 2009 Copenhagen conference end in failure, people lose faith that serious solutions are feasible. Firms no longer believe that regulation of climate-altering gases is inevitable, and they cut back on clean-energy research and development. Politicians think they can ignore the problem without much public reproach—as is evident especially in the United States, which has historically led on so many other international environmental issues but lags conspicuously on climate change. Environmental groups pare back climate-advocacy efforts and start talking about other topics, like energy security, while hoping that the climate agenda can be sneaked in. Even individual consumers throw up their hands: Why bother making climate-conscious (and often more expensive) choices with no sign of support from leaders or institutions? Failure begets failure.

Dealing with short-lived climate pollutants can bring visible success to the climate-change fight because the politics of managing these pollutants is easier for most countries to fathom. For example, managing the most noxious short-lived climate pollutants goes hand in hand with improving local air quality (Barker et al., 2007). Because methane, ozone, and aerosols interact with one another, a change in the concentration of one changes the others. Tropospheric ozone is a major pollutant and threat to human health as well as a strong warming agent; similarly, sulfate pollutants affect the warming rate from black carbon (Ramana et al., 2010). Thus, when air-quality managers act to reduce the forms of air pollution they are already familiar with, they also have a large impact on climate change and improve public health and agriculture (Auffhammer et al., 2006). In short, efforts to cut short-lived climate pollutants yield tangible, local benefits that can help even reluctant nations take action. The other bit of good news is that scientists have learned many new ways to regulate short-lived pollutants.

Societies know how to make deep cuts in soot because a few have already done so. For example, California’s successful program to limit emissions from diesel engines, power plants, and other sooty sources cut black-carbon emissions in half in just two decades. The costs of soot emissions reduction are not zero, but they are manageable (EPA, 2005; UNEP, 2011). These dramatic reductions were achieved through a suite of policies that capped particulate-matter emissions across vehicle types and encouraged use of diesel particulate filters and alternative fuels. In China and India, perhaps the world’s biggest emitters of soot, emission controls will be even cheaper, because those countries can start by making the least expensive cuts while also taking advantage of technologies already developed elsewhere in the world.

While the stars are now aligning for serious action on short-lived climate pollutants, efforts to manage carbon dioxide remain mired in political difficulties. Until new technologies are available and international institutions build much higher credibility, efforts to manage this greenhouse gas will involve swimming upstream against heavy political currents. Not only are the costs and benefits of carbon controls mismatched in time, but the geography of costs and benefits is also toxic to politicians. Most of the harm caused by each nation’s carbon dioxide is felt in other countries. Each nation, thinking about its own costs and benefits, becomes reluctant to take action on carbon dioxide unless confident that all others are engaged in a similar program. Getting serious about cutting soot and other short-lived climate pollutants won’t be easy, but the effort is less likely to be derailed by selfish, short-sighted logic. Much of the harm from short-lived climate pollutants is felt within each nation, and so is much of the benefit of reductions.

In part, the gridlock on global warming for the past two decades reflects basic political logic. Climate scientists, worried about long-term global warming, have asked politicians to take heroic actions that no one keen on re-election would be wise to embrace. Instead of imagining politics in the mode of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, a smarter strategy finds ways to align the climate problem with the logic of real-world politics. Short-lived climate pollutants can help immensely on that front, because the political logic for action on soot and other such pollutants involves swimming with the current.

Success with short-lived climate pollutants can help fix the problem of credibility in international climate-change policy. By demonstrating that countries can work together to make visible improvements to the climate, mitigation of short-lived climate pollutants can help build credibility along with practical experience that will be essential for the much harder problem of tackling carbon dioxide. Working hard on these short-lived emissions, starting now, is not a substitute for serious action on long-lived pollutants like carbon dioxide. Politically and environmentally they are complements; swift action on short-lived climate pollution could slow by a few decades some of the more severe effects of climate warming, such as a rise in sea level (Hu et al., 2013).

Adaptation is not a four-letter word

After decades of inaction, the planet is nearing the cusp of what may be major tipping points in the climate system. For example, by increasing the absorption of sunlight by the Arctic Ocean, the retreat of Arctic sea ice and snow cover is changing the pattern of polar warming and increasing its rate. The consequences for weather patterns around the world are beginning to be felt (Liu et al., 2012; Screen and Simmonds, 2010). By working to cut short-lived climate pollutants, major countries can delay these and other reconfigurations of the climate system. Even so, the need for adaptation is inescapable.

Climate adaptation isn’t a discrete act. Done well, it is part of an overall risk-management strategy. Risk is conventionally defined as the product of the probability of a given event and the magnitude of its impact. For decades, climate-change policy makers have focused on the first part of the equation by focusing on mitigation. While continued efforts to reduce the probability of catastrophic climate changes remain essential, it is foolish to ignore the second factor. Adaptation helps cut the costs of climate warming, which is critical for reducing the human toll of climate change.

Because adaptation to climate change is mostly an intensely local activity, it has a cruel political logic of its own—a logic that has profound implications for climate policy. The countries most vulnerable to changing climate tend to be poor. Poor countries have fewer resources to invest in adaptation; their economies also tend to be based more heavily on agriculture, the economic sector most immediately vulnerable to changes in climate and weather. The poor countries by and large are least responsible for causing climate change in the first place, but they find themselves on the front lines of an economic disaster they didn’t create.

There is a compelling moral argument to help these countries adapt. Just sending money, however, isn’t very practical. Most adaptation involves things that countries should do anyway—for example, some are already investing in better storm-warning and crop-forecasting systems, since those help farmers and others on the front lines deal with the vagaries of weather while, over the long term, probably also make them more adaptive. Calculating the “agreed incremental cost” of those programs—the normal standard for international financing, widely used in other international environmental treaties—is all but impossible. What’s needed, instead, is a big investment to help spread information about best practices—an idea that in other studies has been called “knowledge action networks” (Kennel et al., 2012). Direct technical funding also plays a role, but effective organization of knowledge-sharing is the key missing ingredient (Kennel, 2009; Kennel and Daultrey, 2010; Rosenzweig and Wilbanks, 2010).

If, or when, it appears that warming is too rapid and the costs of adjustment too great, then even more aggressive efforts to mitigate emissions will be needed. Here, too, short-lived climate pollutants have a prominent role to play. Cutting them is the only means of mitigation that can slow warming on a time scale that is relevant for practical adaptation. Indeed, delaying some climate impacts by just a decade or two could make adaptation much more tractable, because it would allow adjustments with the normal turnover of human infrastructure. Asking cities to deal with imminent unexpected impacts from higher sea levels and storms, or changing agricultural methods under similar hurried conditions, is expensive. Given enough time, the costs can be folded into infrastructure and maintenance budgets—an outcome that is not just economically more efficient but also politically more feasible. And systems made more resilient will probably perform better, day by day.

Getting serious about climate risk management will also require looking closely at other taboos, such as those related to geoengineering. In an emergency, the ability to quickly respond to climate change with crude offsetting measures—for example, injecting reflective particles into the upper atmosphere to cool the planet, as volcanoes do periodically—could be useful. Such measures are fraught with the danger of unintended consequences, but unchecked catastrophic changes in climate could be even worse. The odds of truly catastrophic changes in climate are rising, and the world needs insurance against truly horrible outcomes (Parson and Keith, 2013; Victor et al., 2009).

The new realities of climate change, however, are first and foremost political in impact. For years, it has been convenient for both deniers and activists to focus on science (Oreskes and Conway, 2010). Deniers have set standards for scientific proof that can’t be met, while supporters have claimed that the science is so “settled” that no further motivation for action is needed. Deniers claim that the science is full of holes, not good enough to prompt immediate action. Supporters of action react by redoubling their efforts to bolster the scientific case. Indeed, each successive report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—the international body that does a full assessment of climate science every five to seven years—has made increasingly definitive warnings. If those warnings were sufficient, there would have been political action already. In practically every grand and difficult topic in science, the experts disagree on many matters. Scientific uncertainties are not cause for paralysis. Instead, they are fundamental to understanding the challenges of climate change as matters of risk management.

Inaction on climate change reflects the lack of a political strategy that rewards those who take action; it is not the product of scientific doubt. The beauty of science is that it is never settled; last year’s results are precursors to next year’s discoveries. The trick for climate scientists of the warming generation—just as it was for the atomic scientists of the bomb generation—is to marry good science with smart politics.