By Chris Davey
The analogy of a rapidly filling bath has been used for some time to describe the continual filling of the Earth’s atmosphere with greenhouse gases. The bath is getting nearer to overflowing all the time and you try your best to stop it by bailing out with a bucket, or maybe setting up a siphon to take some of the water off. But the water level gets higher and higher – what to do? Eventually the penny drops — you must turn off the tap! Then at least the level will not get any higher.
As with many analogies, this one is far from perfect. Once you have stopped the level getting higher, emptying the bath, or at least lowering the level considerably, could be easily achieved by pulling out the plug. Not so with the atmosphere; warming would continue for some time after emissions ceased, then the temperature would stabilise, and then fall slowly thanks to the natural mechanisms that have kept the planet largely stable for much of its existence. The process could now be hastened by planting more forests, rewilding land (biodiverse ground absorbs more carbon), managing wetlands and maybe eventually, drawing down some of the carbon in the air using appropriate technologies (currently nowhere near sufficiently developed at scale to achieve the necessary extraction).
So what would it take to get that tap turned off and stop, or nearly stop, emissions? Some experts say we could do it without much difficulty or delay – there are some areas that are more problematic to decarbonise, but we could reduce it to a dribble in terms of the bath analogy, which would be far better than what is happening at present, which is virtually nothing. So with a few engineering issues to be resolved, the technology is not the problem – it’s the political will to do it.
Many climate scientists have shied away from making anything resembling political statements, being in strict “evidence mode” rather than stating opinions. But this may be changing. Several people have broken ranks and said clearly that we need something of a reset if we are to keep warming below 20C above pre-industrial levels*, the 1.50C “guard rail” limit being effectively blown. I’ve mentioned a few such individuals in previous articles.
Now my intention was never to make my comments here political – well, except to make a few references to post-Brexit EU “legacy” funding for Cornwall! But it’s becoming increasingly apparent that we cannot separate completely the factual information on climate breakdown from the changes likely to be necessary to remedy the situation. And some of those changes would be quite far-reaching. Tweaking business-as-usual, which we’ve been doing since the first COP thirty years ago, has obviously not worked.
Here in UK, we now have a government taking environmental issues far more seriously than the previous one. The creation of Great British Energy, the decision not to award any new licences for fossil fuel extraction in the North Sea, and the removal of barriers to on-shore wind — these are all very encouraging for folks like me who want real climate action. But real climate action, it is not. Real climate action would see emissions falling, and not relying on the future viability of carbon capture. And not allowing the expansion of Rosebank to go ahead – and emphatically not allowing a third runway at Heathrow.
Then there is the relentless pursuit of economic growth, not necessarily “green growth”, measured using gross domestic product (GDP), which is not some scientific coefficient, but a human-created benchmark. I’m no economist, but I wonder is it really the most appropriate way to measure the “wealth”, in the broadest sense of the word, of a country? This seems to be unquestioned except by a few voices such as that of Kate Raworth with her concept of Doughnut Economics, which I featured in the September 2024 issue of Still European. Feel free to go back to it and refresh your memory!
*However James Hansen, who has studied the climate for decades, and famously testified before a senate committee in 1988 that we were changing the climate by burning fossil fuels, has recently said that the 20C rise is now unavoidable.
