What Could Keep Climate Change From Becoming Catastrophic?

Climate change will be bad. What is it like? Is it possible to stop it from turning into a disaster? You can choose a definition of Catastrophic. If you are in the Bay Area on September 28, you might want to attend Re:WIRED Green, a one-day event on how human ingenuity can tackle climate change. There will be talks, demos, and discussions with people working on this problem. The topic of this month's update is nice.

Swinging for the climate fence.

People who call themselves climate optimists say things like, "Yes, it's really bad, but humans have been good at warding off really bad things." The Malthusian trap is an ozone hole. "We did it before so we'll do it again" may not be the logic you want to rely on. It is difficult to switch the global economy away from fossil fuels. Who knew at the time?

At WIRED we look at some of the more out there technological solutions, and the story is usually something like: "This is promising, but there are some nasty trade-offs." Carbon capture and storage, also known asCCS, is an example that we wrote about in-depth last December and again last month. A lot of experts agree that this is a necessary supplement to pumping out less carbon in the first place. The technology is expensive, hard to scale, and is turning into a gold rush for companies that burn fossil fuels. Capitalism is for you.

Take a CCS technology that uses trees. It takes a long time for new trees to absorb carbon like the old-growth forests. If you can genetically modify trees and other plants to suck up carbon faster, but you don't know the long-term effects, people are nervous. It might take too long to breed trees that are non- GM.

There are alternative fuels. If you switch over, you'll have to use morefertilizer to grow biofuel crops, which in turn will produce emissions. The marketing of low-carbon beef could encourage people to eat more of it, since it is still higher-carbon than other meat. You need more farming infrastructure if you want to grow special crops to burn as fuel.

We're not lacking in creativity. Some of the technologies are not as controversial as those above. The world could be kept under 2 degrees of warming. What's not there? Financing and political will are needed to get countries to stick to their pledges. The Senate passed a climate bill on Sunday.