Most reputable climate scientists project a global environmental catastrophe (such as the irreversible loss of the Greenland ice sheet, for example, causing sea levels to rise on the order of 23 feet) if and when temperatures reach 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) above the mean temperature that existed at the start of the Industrial Revolution. We have already warmed the Earth approximately 1.7 degrees F. since that time. Utilizing current technologies (and with a nod towards profitability), extraction of currently known recoverable fossil-based fuels will warm the planet an additional 2.8 degrees F., or 4.5 degrees F., well beyond the "disaster" consensus.
Michael Greenstone of the University of Chicago has now calculated how hot the world will get if we extract and use all of the available fossil fuels accessible (though not necessarily cost-efficiently), through current technology, including coal, shale and oil, rather than leave them in the ground. In an article written for the New York Times, Greenstone concludes:
[T]he use of all reserves and resources would lead to a total increase of 16.2 degrees. Today’s climate and planet would very likely be unrecognizable.
Greenstone is a Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago and runs the Energy Policy Institute there. Greenstone's
methodology tallied the projected temperature increase attributable to use of fossil fuels extracted from the ground thus far, coupling it with the projected capacity of carbon emission damage (global warming) that could be expected from digging up, drilling, fracking, and burning the world's current "accessible" fossil fuel reserves.
The 16.2 degree figure puts us in a world we can scarcely imagine. At four degrees rise, carbon vegetation sinks will no longer function, accelerating the warming dramatically. An increase of 12 degrees Fahrenheit would exceed what scientists term the "wet-bulb limit" for significant portions of the globe. The "wet-bulb" limit notes that human beings are essentially just organisms with skin trapping heat at levels of 98.6 degrees:
Wet-bulb temperature is equivalent to what is felt when wet skin is exposed to moving air. It includes temperature and atmospheric humidity and is measured by covering a standard thermometer bulb with a wetted cloth and fully ventilating it.
The researchers calculated that humans and most mammals, which have internal body temperatures near 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, will experience a potentially lethal level of heat stress at wet-bulb temperature above 95 degrees sustained for six hours or more.
A temperature change of 21 degrees Fahrenheit would make half the world uninhabitable, according to
research from Purdue University. As we approach such temperatures:
"Whole countries would intermittently be subject to severe heat stress requiring large-scale adaptation efforts," Huber said. "One can imagine that such efforts, for example the wider adoption of air conditioning, would cause the power requirements to soar, and the affordability of such approaches is in question for much of the Third World that would bear the brunt of these impacts. In addition, the livestock on which we rely would still be exposed, and it would make any form of outside work hazardous."
Presumably some sort of tightly-controlled and regimented system of agriculture would be salvageable to provide subsistence to the remaining populations.
The reassuring news, of course, is that the more selfless aspects of human nature (as evidenced, for example, by the concerned behavior of the elected representatives who currently make up more than half the Congress in the world's richest and most educated Democracy) will almost certainly prevail over sheer economic, short-term self-interest. Or not:
Without pricing carbon to reflect expected climate damages, all of this coal, oil and natural gas is worth many trillions of dollars, so keeping it in the ground would mean passing up economic opportunities that are waiting to be taken and turning our backs on a long history of going to great lengths to recover these energy sources. A January study in Nature developed estimates of which fuels would have to be abandoned to stay below the 3.6-degree threshold. It found that most Canadian tar sands; all Arctic oil and gas; and a significant share of potential shale gas would need to stay locked up. It also found that major coal producers like the United States would need to keep 90 percent of their reserves in the ground.
To his credit, Greenstone valiantly suggests ways that he thinks could avoid this disaster. He suggests pricing carbon globally so that the price levels the playing field among all types of energy sources. He acknowledges, though, that we're a long way from that, and that current carbon prices are lower than the projected cost of damage from carbon emissions. So a global carbon pricing system seems unlikely to happen, even if the Kochs' and Exxon's puppets in the Republican Party miraculously signed on to anything remotely reminscent of something Al Gore might recommend.
A second method is to find a way to reduce the cost of low-carbon energy sources such as nuclear, solar and wind power to a point where their cost is less than extracting fossil fuels. Now that the country has essentially sold itself silly on the novel idea of fracking away every last bit of shale underlying our public lands, that day looks even more distant than it might have ten years ago:
In other words, it seems unlikely that today’s low carbon energy sources will play a major role in the solution without significant public investment in research, development and test deployments of new technologies.
These are the same technologies that publicly-elected Republican governors, with the aid of publicly-elected Republican statehouses, in their slavish obeisance to their fossil-fuel masters, are
cutting. They are the technologies that, should a Republican ever become President again, will be abolished or put so far on the back burner that George W. Bush will look like a raging environmentalist.
The final approach would be to continue to "drill, baby, drill," but somehow figure out a cost-efficient way to store all that carbon before it is released into the atmosphere, or take it out of the atmosphere after it is released. Or build giant mirrors to reflect the sun away from the Earth. Or something. But the stark consequence of continuing on with our present behaviors and attitudes is inescapable:
If we use all of the fossil fuels in the ground, the planet will warm in a way that is difficult to imagine. Unless the economics of energy markets change, we are poised to use them.