Over the past year climate change has been put on the back burner by governments and business preoccupied with more pressing, largely economic issues. Mitigation measures especially have been throttled back. Incremental mitigation action within continuing political and economic business as usual over the past three decades has barely effected emissions and alert fatigue, cost of living concerns, bogus cultural wars, etc., have sapped both public’s and policymaker’s energy for climate mitigation. They’re ignoring climate and giving up. Only disruptive emergency action is going to work now and there is no appetite or possibility for that right now (even if everybody understands that climate danger isn’t going away but getting worse and doing nothing isn’t an option).
This is happening despite increasingly destructive climate events and increasingly dire climate science predictions. Warming has risen at a gobsmacking bananas rate over the past couple of years; global mean temperature rise has charged up to the old guardrail of a 1.5C rise in temperature; and scientists are warning that we are approaching (if not over) tipping points where temperature rise due to our emissions could set off feedbacks that could raise temperatures many more degrees to where our global civilization (if not humanity itself) would be in serious danger.
What is lacking is a robust consensus, nationally and globally, about how serious climate change is and therefor what mitigation measures are required. Presently there is a very wide spectrum of opinion on climate – the old flat earth denial of the science and the questioning of human caused warming is no longer tenable, but there is still ample room for those who don’t want to act, who don’t want to effectively mitigate, to deny and delay.
But in the doom and gloom of climate news in 2024, where dis and mis information on climate reached an all time high, the potential for new consensus building processes is quietly developing.
Climate change is a subject so complex and so broad, so ensnarled in everyday values and ideologies, so mixed up in great science and woeful conspiracy theories that an overarching robust consensus is hard to achieve. There is definitive science; the IPCC has done yeoman’s work correlating the vast and diverse physical science; but their seven year cycles inevitably lag behind recent climate events and recent discoveries, theories and papers; and the IPCC process has been kept overly conservative by governmental minders seemingly more concerned with shoehorning the scientific consensus into political and economic BAU.
And then there is how this scientific consensus and present climate events are interpreted in existing value systems. The spectrum of climate understanding now stretches from, for example, Trump’s new cabinet choices, who acknowledge the climate is changing but believe that this is probably beneficial and that, even if there are some problems, they are insignificant compared to the incredible modernity made possible by fossil fuels. At the far other end of the spectrum, there are doomers who think the Venus Syndrome is going to happen next week and therefor nothing matters.
We urgently need a much more robust consensus about climate change: physical science, the exact suite of potential dangers, timelines and tipping points, and, therefor, what reasonable, responsible risk management and effective mitigation is needed. The processes and tools to build such a robust consensus, nationally and globally, are being developed at the same time as policymakers and institutions recognize the requisite utility – and present lack – of such a defining consensus.
For example, a very interesting new paper on the social cost of carbon was published on PNAS late in the year. The paper by Moore et el surveys the past two decades of research on the cost of carbon, over 1800 papers; it then assembles a formidable array of experts to update and improve upon the methodology and data; and finally it uses innovative machine learning to process and improve all that has been previously known to generate a much more robust, up to date calculus of the social cost of carbon today.
The social cost of carbon quantifies the damage a ton of carbon dioxide has on society and the economy.
“When people worry about climate change, they worry about the risk and uncertainty it causes,” said lead author Frances Moore, an associate professor in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at UC Davis.
“They worry about long-term, persistent accumulating effects, such as climate change acting as a drag on economic growth. They worry about impacts to very unique natural systems or cultural heritage that are just irreplaceable. Those are what keep people up at night about climate change, and those are not fully included in SCC estimates currently used for policymaking.”
Their updated, state of the art, social cost of carbon is US$280 a ton, more than double the average of previous SCC estimates.
According to the last Global Carbon Budget report global greenhouse emissions hit a new high of 34.7 billion metric tons in 2024. At $280 per ton this equals a $9.71 trillion quantification of the present annual damage caused by our use of fossil fuels.
$9.71 trillion! A year; every year and growing.
Considering that a dollar figure on the social cost of carbon is a very precise quantification of climate change and that this is a language that almost everybody on our current Tower of Babel understands, I think you have a glimpse here of just how robust a consensus about climate change can be built nationally and globally, including every diverse values or political position, in a relatively short time, perhaps even in the next year.
There are, of course, limitations to only an economic quantification of climate change today and what can be expected economically in the near and further future. This social cost of carbon does include some quantification of the existential tipping point dangers but not the possibility of no modern economy (or no humanity) surviving at all.
It doesn’t capture the unthinkable possible pain and suffering and loss of life. It doesn’t capture the loss of an inhabitable world to every future generation caused by the accidental side effect of our use of fossil fuels.
But a $9.71 trillion annual cost of using fossil fuels – certain to expand if we continue to produce and use fossil fuels when climate change is already accelerating – must get the attention of those presently refusing to take climate change seriously, refusing to effectively mitigate.
Is recognizing this huge cost enough to get us to emergency action? No, not in the present short term BAU – but this cost of damage consensus will help if and when we get serious about climate and effective mitigation. This has to happen soon.
(My next CounterCurrents oped will present a possible process to build a more robust consensus amongst legislators about climate change.)
Bill Henderson is a climate activist
