RealClimate: Movie review: SWITCH
[Raymond T. Pierrehumbert] There are some oblique references to CO2 emissions, but no mention of the essentially irreversible effect of these emissions on climate...CO2 is forever
...
You begin to suspect something is really wrong when the first guy on screen to say something about climate is Richard Muller, of Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project fame, who managed to convert himself from a climate change denialist to a lukewarmer by arduously and noisily rediscovering what every working climate scientist already knew to be true. What Muller has to say about climate is that burning fossil fuels will cause the Earth to warm by about 2 degrees (“if the calculations are right”), but it’s going to be too expensive to stop it so we’ll just learn to live with it. There are so many things wrong with Muller’s statement that I hardly know where to begin. First, it is far from clear that a 2 degree warmer world is one that we can adapt to
SWITCH is made to appeal to fans of an “all of the above” energy strategy, but it never confronts the fact that if we want to preserve a livable climate, “all” simply cannot include continued (let alone expanded) use of fossil fuels for very much longer. The biggest challenge we face is not learning how to extract every last scrap of fossil fuel, but learning how to leave most of it in the ground...from here on in, coal is all bad, and the less of it anybody burns, the better.
...SWITCH never tells you that China could attain the standard of living of France without increasing its emissions at all, just by increasing the carbon efficiency of its economy to the current French level...The fact that we will all pay for the consequences of a wrecked climate never figures into any of the costs mentioned in this movie.
...the sooner SWITCH disappears from the public discourse, the better.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment