Humans and the Global Carbon Cycle: A Faustian Bargain?
11:25 to 12:00 Morning keynote speaker, Berrien Moore III, Climate Central, Humans and the Global Carbon Cycle: A Faustian Bargain?
An age-old phrase is “You can’t do anything about the weather.” This may be true about weather, but it is not true about planet’s environment and its climate.
We know that human activity has altered significantly the environment at the global scale: specifically, human activities have perturbed fundamental global biogeochemical cycle, the carbon cycle, such that the values of important state variables, such as the concentration of atmospheric CO2, are moving into a range unprecedented during the past 25 million years.
The increase in the atmospheric CO2 concentrations (as well as other greenhouse gases) due to human activity has produced concern regarding the heat balance of the global atmosphere, and this shift in the heat balance will force the global climate system in ways that are not well understood, given the complex interactions and feedbacks involved. There is general agreement that global patterns of temperature will warm and precipitation will change, though the magnitude, distribution, and timing of these changes are far from certain.
Stabilizing this increase in atmospheric CO2 is a very daunting task. First and foremost, the rise is due primarily to fossil fuel use, and fossil fuel consumption is at the center of industrialized societies. Moreover, stabilizing emissions does not stabilize the concentration in the atmosphere, and even after achieving stabilization of CO2 in the atmosphere, climate will continue to change, with both ocean and land temperature continuing to rise for decades, and sea levels continuing to rise for centuries. Therefore, the world has a “pre-committed” warming on account of carbon dioxide that humans have already added to the atmosphere.
The issues are complex and compelling: What do we know; what do we think we know; what do we not know; what should we do, and what should we not do? How do we undo this Faustian bargain?
