En-ROADS - Required Playtime
Tune out Sharm el Sheikh and tune in to En-ROADS
The big circus playing in Sharm el Sheikh is displacement activity, unlikely to do anything substantial to moderate global warming over the short, medium or long-term.
Regardless, we are at the start of the New Hot Age which will increasingly distort our economies, our politics, the way we are governed, if the lessons of the Little Ice Age of the 17th century are anything to go by. I’m probably a member of the last cohort for whom ‘I’m not interested in climate change’ is possible. For my children, and their children, climate change will definitely be interested in them: indeed, it will tend to dominate many aspects of their lives.
This fate is highly unlikely to be avoided. That, at least, is what we can conclude from playing around with the En-ROADS climate simulation model. Time was we could dismiss ‘climate scientists’ as the boobies of the science world, unable to code, unable sometimes even to operate a spreadsheet. That’s no longer true: MIT’s En-ROADS machine works from “a system dynamics model carefully grounded in the best available science, and has been calibrated against a wide range of existing integrated assessment, climate, and energy models.” This means the model orchestrates a swathe of feedbacks, and it’s those feedbacks which produce the result.
You can, and should, play around with En-ROADS to get an idea of what the world would need to do now, and keep doing, to keep this century’s global temperature rise to within 1 degree Celsius.
I’ll list the measures En-ROADS model tells us we’d need to take now to keep the rise within a single degree:
‘very highly tax’ coal, oil, natural gas
‘highly subsidize’ renewables and nuclear power
make sure the carbon price remains ‘very high’
make a ‘huge breakthrough’ in new zero-carbon technologies.
ensure energy efficiency of transport is ‘highly increased’ with electrification ‘highly incentivized’
ensure energy efficiency of buildings is ‘highly increased’, with electrification ‘highly incentivized’.
ensure population shows the ‘lowest growth’, and at the same time economic growth is kept ‘low’
deforestation is ‘highly reduced’ and afforestation has ‘high growth’
emissions of methane and other gases are ‘highly reduced’
there is ‘high growth’ of technological carbon removal.
Do all of that now, and keep doing it, and the En-ROADS model reckons we can keep temperature rises to 1 degree by 2100.
The chances of this happening? Zero.
If we just maintain the status quo, the En-ROADS model is showing a rise of 3.5 degrees by 2100.
I urge you to play around with the En-ROADS model, experimenting with the menu of measures which could potentially be taken, breakthroughs which might or might not be assumed, and big macro assumptions (population, growth), to see whether it is possible to construct a series of options which are a) possible and b) tolerable which c) damps down global warming sufficiently (as if we know what that is).
These choices are, after all, what a significant chunk of politics will be fought over.
After an hour or so playing around with the variables, I can tell you this: electric cars powered by nuclear power ain’t going to be the solution. Sorry.