Staying power

Another question on climate change: How long, after we are done with fossil fuels, will the CO2 hang around?

Popular notion has been that the lifetime of CO2 typically say it lasts “a century or more” or “more than a hundred years”. Bad enough. But now, scientists at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, California are saying it will last much longer!

In an upcoming paper in Annual Reviews of Earth and Planetary Sciences they say the gas and hence the warming will linger far into the future. University of Chicago oceanographer David Archer, who led the study, says in his new book The Long Thaw, “The lifetime of fossil fuel CO2 in the atmosphere is a few centuries, plus 25 percent that lasts essentially forever. The next time you fill your tank, reflect upon this”.

Perhaps this calls for another revision for what is the safe level of the gas if the planet is to have another chance, or rather, the race is to survive! We brought down the number from 550ppm to 450ppm to 350ppm to realize recently the way we are going, we just cannot prevent a 2-3 degree rise!

Now there are serious thoughts being given to how we tackle the problem, whose consequences can be seen very soon, within our lifetimes. Do we resort to geo-engineering, where we put in place sunshades and aerosols up there in the atmosphere?? Interfering with nature. Bad as it is, some see it as inevitable. Though no one knows for sure what damage we will add in the process!

Is it that difficult for us to cut down emissions? Yes, at least some think so.

Going by the choice of words used by Todd Stern, Obama’s top climate change negotiator, the US, whom the rest of the world was looking up to, may take its time. ‘We need to be very mindful of what the dictates of science are, and of the art of the possible,” he said. About the Bali targets – a 25% to 40% cut by industrialized nations by 2020 – he said that it is not possible to get that kind of number. ‘It’s not going to happen.’

So?? Are we going to sit around and be cooked up? A nice allegory in a recent article likened what we are doing to the planet, to a man who finds the cold too unbearable and sets his home on fire, for warmth!