‘Blue sky thinking’!

BeckyBendyLegs (2015). Why is the sky blue? [online]. Available from: <http://beckybendylegs.com/why-is-the-sky-blue/>. [Accessed 09th January 2016].

Previously we saw that in order to meet the 2°C target that action should be taken now, reading a little more in to future issues I came across a number of papers discussing such issues.  Booth et al, (2012) use “full coupled climate–carbon cycle model and a systematic method to explore uncertainties in the land carbon cycle feedback” what they found was that the feedbacks were lager that even those estimated by the IPCC, stating that the most important uncertainty was that of photosynthetic metabolism in response to temperature, their study showed these responses to play a key role in future changes (Booth et al, 2012).  So we need to limit temperature increases to minimise the effect to plant metabolism to limit their effect on temperature, but to do this we need to reduce CO₂ emissions. 

Friedlingstein et al, (2014) discuss the growth of such emissions and their implications, they state that these emissions have increased by “2.5% per year on average over the past decade” (Friedlingstein et al, 2014). We are already two thirds of a way through our quota of CO₂ if we are to meet the 2°C target, continuing at the current rate we have less than 30 years left of our quota.  Not very long at all.  The business as usual approach that I touched upon at the start of my blog is just no longer viable.

The business as usual approach would see continued use of fossil fuels but McGlade et al, (2015) suggest that continued unabated use would push us over our target temperature.   They state that if were are to even have a 50% chance of keeping with in our target temperature range, then between 2011 and 2050 the cumulative carbon emissions must not exceed 1,100 giga-tonnes.  Using all of the fossil fuel reserves would push us three times over that limit.  It may be a hard pill to swallow for some, for example to meet the targets over 80% of coal reserves should not be used between 2010 and 2050 (McGlade et al, 2015). 

Maybe ‘business as usual’ needs some ‘blue sky thinking’!

References;

Booth, B.B.  Jones, C.D.  Collins, M.  Totterdell, I.J.  Cox, P.M.  Sitch, S.  Huntingford, C.  Betts, R.A.  Harris, G.R. Lloyd, J.   (2012). High sensitivity of future global warming to land carbon cycle processes. ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH LETTERS. 7, pp.24002 (8pp).

Friedlingstein, P.  Andrew, R.M.  Rogelj, J. Peters, P.G.  Canadell, J.G.  Knutti, R.   Luderer, G.   Raupach, M.R.  Schaeffer, M.  Vuuren, P.D.  Le Quéré, C.  (2014). Persistent growth of CO2 emissions and implications for reaching climate targets. NATURE GEOSCIENCE. 7, pp.709 - 715.

McGlade, C.  Ekins, P.  (2015). The geographical distribution of fossil fuels unused when limiting global warming to 26C. NATURE. 517, pp.187 - 202.