8.5: Solutions

When you communicate climate change science, be sure to include information on solutions. Nobody wants to hear about hopelessness, and in the case of climate change, there are many reasons to be hopeful. Climate change poses difficult problems and challenges, but there are lots of solutions that are both creative and practical and that can help solve the problems and overcome the challenges of climate change.

I think the main barriers to action today are not technical or financial. They are a lack of widespread political will and a lack of wise and inspiring political leadership. Science can help to inform policy, but only concerned people and responsive, capable governments can decide what policies are best, and then implement them.

In the United States today, we clearly do not yet have national agreement on climate change. Some people in the federal government sound just like Uncle Pete. Despite the strong scientific consensus, climate change is controversial politically. Incidentally, there are many lawyers in Congress, but as this is written (2018) only one member of Congress is a PhD scientist. Maybe that should change!

There is no silver bullet that solves all the challenges of climate change, but there is lots of silver buckshot, including increased energy efficiency and energy conservation and much more use of sun, wind, and water to provide the energy the world needs. These renewable resources are widely available now and already cost-competitive with fossil fuels. We have the technology. We lack the political will to act. At least, that has been true for decades, but there is evidence that a change is occurring now.

Faced with the very real threats of climate change, the nations of the world agreed in Paris in late 2015 to limit the warming to a specific maximum amount. That amount is 2°C, or 3.6°F, above the average global temperature in the early 1800s, before human activities began to have a large effect. At the urging of the most vulnerable countries, delegates in Paris also agreed to “pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 degrees Celsius,” although it was widely understood that successfully meeting this aspirational goal would be much more difficult than meeting the 2.0°C target.

After Paris, is the glass half empty or half full? I am guardedly optimistic. I see many reasons for optimism, and I encourage all of you to learn about them and communicate them to your Uncle Pete and your audiences:

World leaders are engaged; at least almost all of them are.

• Emissions of heat-trapping gases have begun to decline in some countries.
• Solar and wind energy have dropped drastically in price and continue to become cheaper.
• Renewable energy use in many countries is increasing rapidly.
• Many corporations are now acting to reduce emissions.
• States and localities are acting too.
• Many countries are showing rapid progress.

I’m also encouraged by recent polling that shows that in the United States, more people accept the science and are very concerned about global warming than was the case only a few years ago. However, when virtually the entire leadership of the Republican party in the United States rejects the findings of mainstream climate change science and considers climate change to be a hoax, we clearly have a long way to go. In the United States, climate change has become a very partisan issue.

Figure 8.5.1 An array of wind turbines on a dike in The Netherlands. Renewable energy, typified by wind and solar power, is a key part of efforts to wean the world from fossil fuels. Reproduced with permission from Sylvia Bal Somerville.

Fortunately, it is quite possible to power the entire world on carbon free energy. The technology is available today and continues to improve rapidly. In this country, even without decisive action by the federal government, I am guardedly optimistic. Figure 8.5.1 illustrates wind power. Wind and solar power are both already cheaper than fossil fuel power in many areas, even without subsidies and when the many hidden costs of fossil fuel power, such as health effects of air pollution, are not taken into account.

Market forces now favor carbon-free energy. Coal companies are going bankrupt. Renewable energy gets cheaper every year. Electric vehicles are happening fast. Much energy policy in the United States is set at state and local levels, not in Washington.

Uncle Pete needs to know that free-market, small-government mechanisms, ones he may prefer and approve of, such as revenue-neutral carbon fee-and-rebate plans, can work. Some have been advocated by leading conservatives, who argue that it is sensible insurance, hedging against climate change risk, whether one accepts climate science or not. Pete should study this approach. I urge you to study it and then talk about it to your Uncle Pete.

Leaving a healthy climate to your children and their descendants is a worthwhile goal, and a realistic one. It won’t be easy, but it can be done.

We need to help people realize that not acting is also making a choice, one that commits future generations to serious climate change impacts. Research suggests that messages that may invoke fear or dismay are better received if they also include hopeful messages. Thus, we can improve the chances that the public will hear and accept the science if we include positive messages about our ability to solve the problem. For example, we can explain that future climate is in our hands; lower emissions of heat-trapping gases will mean reduced climate change and less severe impacts. We can point out that addressing climate change wisely can yield a variety of benefits to the economy and quality of life. We can explain that acting sooner is preferable to delaying. We can all rise to the challenge of helping the public understand that science can illuminate the choices that we face.

Whether to act to limit global warming to tolerable levels should not depend on your politics. We have only one Earth. Everybody should want to avoid polluting and contaminating this magnificent world, and everybody should agree that we need to protect and preserve our amazing planet. Your policies and values and politics have a role to play in deciding which actions are best, but any rational policy begins by accepting the science.

The world needs to take firm action about the threat of human-caused climate change within the next decade. Research shows that global emissions of heat-trapping gases must peak and decline quickly—within a few years, not a few decades or centuries—if global warming is to be limited to a level that avoids severe climate disruption. Meanwhile, a well-funded and effective professional disinformation campaign has been successful in sowing confusion, and many people like Uncle Pete mistakenly think climate change science is unreliable or is controversial within the scientific expert community. Thus, an urgent task for us scientists and for all communicators of climate change science may be to give the public guidelines for recognizing and rejecting junk science and disinformation. If students today, who will be adults tomorrow, can understand and apply these guidelines, they may not need a detailed knowledge of climate change science. To that end, I offer the following six principles.

1. The essential findings of mainstream climate change science are firm. The world is warming. There are many kinds of evidence: air temperatures, ocean temperatures, melting ice, rising sea levels, and much more. Human activities are the main cause. The warming is not natural. It is not due to the sun, for example. We know this because we can measure the effect of human-made carbon dioxide and it is much stronger than that of changes in the sun, which we also measure.
2. The greenhouse effect is well understood. It is as real as gravity. The foundations of the science are more than 150 years old. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere traps heat. We know that, because careful laboratory experiments prove it and theoretical physics explains it. We know carbon dioxide is increasing, because we measure it. We know the increase is due to human activities like burning fossil fuels, because we can analyze the chemical evidence for that.
3. Our climate predictions are coming true. Many observed climate changes, like rising sea level, are occurring at the high end of the predicted range. Some observed changes, like melting sea ice, are happening faster than the recently anticipated worst case. Unless humankind takes strong steps to halt and reverse the rapid global increase of fossil fuel use and the other activities that cause climate change, and does so in a very few years, severe climate change is inevitable. Urgent action is needed if global warming is to be limited to moderate levels.
4. The climate change myths and falsehoods that Uncle Pete believes in have been refuted many times over. The refutations are on many websites and in many books. For example, the mechanisms causing natural climate change like ice ages are irrelevant to the current warming. We know why ice ages come and go. That is due to changes in the Earth’s orbit around the sun, changes that take thousands of years. The warming that is occurring now, over just a few decades, cannot possibly be caused by such slow-acting processes. However, it can be caused by human-made additions of heat-trapping substances to the atmosphere.
5. Science has its own high standards. Science does not mean unqualified people, who do not carry out scientific research, making unsubstantiated claims on television or the internet. Science means expert scientists doing research and publishing it in carefully reviewed research journals. Other scientists examine the research and repeat it and extend it. Valid results are confirmed, and wrong ones are exposed and abandoned. Science in the long run is self-correcting. People who are not experts, who are not trained and experienced in this field, who do not do research and publish it following standard scientific practice, are not doing science. When they claim that they are the real experts, they are not being truthful.
6. The leading scientific organizations of the world, such as national academies of science and professional societies of scientists in fields relevant to climate change, have carefully examined the results of climate science and endorsed these results. It is silly to imagine that thousands of climate scientists worldwide are engaged in a massive conspiracy to fool everybody. It is also silly to think that a few minor errors in the extensive IPCC reports can invalidate the reports. The first thing that the world needs to do to confront the challenge of climate change wisely is to learn about what science has discovered and accept it.

Figure 8.5.2 Reproduced from US Global Change Research Program. 2014.

One last time: Always remember why we want to communicate climate change science. We want to inform people. We want to motivate them. We want them to act. The biggest unknown about future climate is human behavior. Figure 8.5.2 is a good illustration of the main take-home message from climate change science communication. These projections show that with lower global emissions of heat-trapping gases—that’s the map on the left—we can limit warming in the contiguous United States late in this century to about half of what it would be if we continue to rely on fossil fuels for the world’s energy—that’s the map on the right. The choice is up to us. Everything depends on what people and their governments do.