Zeke Hausfather Profile picture
Jan 23, 2020 7 tweets 2 min read Read on X
A provocative piece by @TedNordhaus in today's Wall Street Journal makes the case that effective climate policy is one that promotes human prosperity – particularly in poorer countries – while adopting policies to invest in and promote clean energy. wsj.com/articles/ignor… 1/7
The piece argues continuing political, economic and technological modernization, not a radical remaking of society, is key to both slowing climate change and adapting to it. It suggests a richer world is one of lower population growth, higher equality and adaptive capacity. 2/7
This is also the assumption underlying the future scenarios used by the IPCC. The most sustainable future (SSP1) with the easiest path to deep decarbonization is also one of the highest economic growth and lowest population scenarios considered: 3/7
Nordhaus argues "Long-term economic growth is associated with both rising per capita energy consumption and slower population growth. For this reason, as the world continues to get richer, higher per capita energy consumption is likely to be offset by a lower population." 4/7
Furthermore, a richer world is one where it is easier to decouple the growth of human welfare from environmental degradation, where "energy consumption should be less carbon-intensive than it would be in a poorer, less technologically advanced future." 5/7
There are strong linkages between growth and adaptive capacity: "In Bangladesh, 300,000 people died in Cyclone Bhola in 1970, when 80% of the population lived in extreme poverty. In 2019, with less than 20% in extreme poverty, Cyclone Fani killed just five people." 6/7
Of course, building human prosperity in a way that also reduces global emissions requires substantial policy interventions. The world has started bending the curve away from high emissions outcomes with investments in clean energy. This needs to have to expand dramatically: 7/7

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More from @hausfath

Sep 24
Theres been a bit of confusion lately around how the climate system response to carbon dioxide removal. While there are complexities, under realistic assumptions a ton of removal is still equal and opposite in its effects to a ton of emissions.

A thread: 1/x Image
When we emit a ton of CO2 into the atmosphere, a bit more than half is reabsorbed by the ocean and the biosphere today (though this may change as a warming world weakens carbon sinks). Put simply, 2 tons of CO2 emissions -> 1 ton of atmospheric accumulation. Image
Carbon removal (CDR) is subject to the same effects; if I remove two tons of CO2 from the atmosphere, the net removal is only one ton due to carbon cycle responses. Otherwise removal would be twice as effective as mitigation, which is not the case.
Read 11 tweets
Aug 14
The carbon cycle has been close to equilibrium through the Holocene; we know this because we measure atmospheric CO2 concentrations in ice cores. But in the past few centuries CO2 has increased by 50%, and is now at the highest level in millions of years due to human emissions. Image
Starting 250 years ago, we began putting lots of carbon that was buried underground for millions of years into the atmosphere. All in all we’ve emitted nearly 2 trillion tons of CO2 from fossil fuels, which is more than the total mass of the biosphere or all human structures: Image
About a trillion of that has accumulated in the atmosphere, increasing CO2 concentrations to levels last seen millions of years ago. The remainder was absorbed by the biosphere and oceans. We can measure these sinks, and it’s incontrovertible that they are indeed net carbon sinks Image
Read 7 tweets
Jul 24
We just published our State of the Climate Q2 update over at @CarbonBrief:

⬆️ Now a ~95% chance 2024 will be the warmest year on record.
⬆️ 13 month streak of records set between June 2023 and June 2024.
⬆️ July 22nd 2024 was the warmest day on record (in absolute terms).
⬇️ July 2024 will very likely come in below July 2023, breaking the record streak.
⬇️ The rest of 2024 is likely to be cooler than 2023 as El Nino fades and La Nina potentially develops.
⬇️ Second lowest Antarctic sea ice on record.carbonbrief.org/state-of-the-c…Image
The past 13 months have each set a new record, with 2024 being quite a bit warmer than 2023 (at ~1.63C above preindustrial levels) in the ERA5 dataset: Image
However, the margin by which records are being set has shrunk; global temperatures were setting new records by a stunning 0.3C to 0.5C in the second half of 2023, but have been breaking the prior records (set in 2016, 2020, or 2023) by only 0.1C to 0.2C this year: Image
Read 7 tweets
Jul 17
Global surface temperatures from @BerkeleyEarth are now out for June. It was the warmest June on record for land, oceans, and the globe as a whole by a sizable margin (~0.14C), and came in at 1.6C above preindustrial levels. berkeleyearth.org/june-2024-temp…
Image
This was the 13th consecutive record setting month, and the 12th month in a row above 1.5C: Image
The exceptional nature of recent global temperatures really stands out when we look at a 12-month moving average: Image
Read 7 tweets
Jul 3
Global temperatures were extremely hot in June 2024, at just over 1.5C, beating June 2023's previous record-setting temperatures by 0.14C and coming in around 0.4C warmer than 2016 (the last major El Nino event).

Now 2024 is very likely to beat 2023 as the warmest year on record Image
June 2024 was so warm that – in the absence of 2023's exceptional warmth – it would have beaten any past July as the warmest absolute monthly temperature experienced by the planet in the historical record: Image
This plot shows how June 2024 stacked up against all the prior Junes since 1940 in the ERA5 dataset: Image
Read 6 tweets
Jun 27
We’ve long talked about the carbon budget, but given that the world is on track to pass the 1.5C target in the coming decade its time to start talking about the "carbon debt".

My latest piece over at The Climate Brink: theclimatebrink.com/p/the-growing-…
Carbon dioxide accumulates in the atmosphere where it lasts for an extremely long time. While about half of our emissions are removed by land and ocean carbon sinks over the first century, it takes on the order of 400,000 years for nature to fully remove a ton of CO2. Image
But it turns out that the warming from our CO2 emissions is also extremely long lived. Even if global CO2 emissions ceased and atmospheric CO2 concentrations began to decline, the warming from those emissions would remain for millennia: pnas.org/doi/full/10.10…
Read 6 tweets

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