George and Climate Change Again

It would seem that George Monbiot doesn't understand that some actions will cause more problems than they might solve:

This is a cut in total emissions, not in emissions per head. If the population were to rise from 6 billion to 9 billion between now and then, we would need an 87% cut in global emissions per person. If carbon emissions are to be distributed equally, the greater cut must be made by the biggest polluters: rich nations like us. The UK's emissions per capita would need to fall by 91%.

But our governments appear quietly to have abandoned their aim of preventing dangerous climate change. If so, they condemn millions to death. What the IPCC report shows is that we have to stop treating climate change as an urgent issue.

Assume that he's right in his predictions (which I don't think that he is but that's another matter) and that failure to cut carbon emissions by 91% in the rich world does indeed mean that millions will die from the effects of climate change.

OK, how many would die from the attempt to cut carbon emissions by 91%? Is it a greater or smaller number than would die from the cimate change? If we don't know that number then we can't make a rational decision. Not shouldn't make a decision, but literally cannot.

I also found this interesting:

But my figure now appears to have been an underestimate. A recent paper in the journal Climatic Change emphasises that the sensitivity of global temperatures to greenhouse gas concentrations remains uncertain. But if we use the average figure, to obtain a 50% chance of preventing more than 2C of warming requires a global cut of 80% by 2050.

There is, to put it mildly, a certain amount of controversy about the numbers for climate sensitivity. James Annan for example seems to think it is rather lower than other estimates. So George is right that it remains uncertain, but then wrong to use the figure he does, as he's not taking into account the full range of said uncertainty in reaching his "average".

Still, let's go back to assuming that George is correct. Emissions have to fall by 87% per capita globally, or 91% in the rich countries. This is to prevent the problems associated with climate change.

So, does anyone think this is possible? Achievable in any manner? Leaving aside the point that I think it would be more costly, both financially and in terms of lives lost, to do so rather than put up with the warming and its effects, I most certainly don't have enough faith in politics and politicians that they would be able to do this.

That leaves us with two further options.

1) We can try geo-engineering. Stick sulphur and soot into the atmosphere for example (we know this works, although with side effects) and recreate the cooling of the 40s to 70s. We could try seeding the oceans with iron (or at least experiment with it). If millions are going to die and there's no credible way that we're going to reduce emissions sufficiently to stop it, we really do have a duty to try these things, don't we?

2) We could (and to my mind should, anyway) prepare for adaptation. That essentially means growing the economy, most especially in the poor countries, as fast as possible. Wealthy places will be able to deal with climate change better than poor ones. In fact, we could do exactly as George suggests:

What the IPCC report shows is that we have to stop treating climate change as an urgent issue. We have to start treating it as an international emergency.

Yes, let's do that. The poor countries need to become rich, very quickly, so that they too will be able to ride the coming storm. This means providing them with aid, of course, the most useful of which is removing the predatory elites which currently rule such places and imposing the rule of law and free economies. Get rid of the bandits currently oppressing the people and let capitalism rip.

This in turn means the return of western intervention...the white man's burden to use a very un-PC phrase. Scour Nigeria free of corruption, hang Obiang, jail Kim Jong Il and so on, so that those currently standing in the way of the only viable course of action are removed.

There will be those of course who insist that it's not that much of an emergency, that at least one of the above suggestions must surely be being made in jest. They might even be right.

But given that I think it's quite obvious that we're not going to cut emissions by 91% by 2050, which one of those suggestions is the joke becomes more difficult to work out.