Procrastinating Climate Remediation isn't Great: Explaining the Science to Non-Scientists

Added: 2026-05-13

[00:00:00]Today for devotions with Daniela we are reading climate change the science of sustainability and how each of us can do our part by Dr. Pablu Hibedo Giaz. This is natural cooling counterforces to global warming.

[00:00:14]According to the climate models used to project global warming and what society should do about it. Carbon emissions should have peaked in 2010 and decreased thereafter to keep limit the temperature increase below the famous two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

[00:00:32]This did not happen. Instead, we are currently heading toward an even worse scenario, potentially up to a four degree increase. And because we failed to hit peak emission a decade ago, we now face a procrastination penalty, which means that the longer we take to reduce emissions to be below the required threshold by better mitigating the current situation, i.e. the longer we procrastinate, the harder it will be to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere.

[00:01:01]Stabilizations means bringing emissions to a peak and then lowering those emissions subsequently. The procrastination penalty means that the longer we take to reach the peak, the faster we'll need to decrease emissions in the following years. The current target set by the IPCC in the 2015 Paris Agreement is to keep atmospheric CO2 concentration below 450 ppm. In 2021, we were at roughly 414 ppm. However, this number only takes carbon dioxide into account, not all the other greenhouse gases we talked about earlier. As a matter of fact, if we did take them into consideration, our CO2 EQ concentration would be well above 450 ppm in the vicinity of 500 ppm. Does that mean it's too late to keep the warming below dangerous levels? Not really. Just like all those gases that contribute to the heating of the planet, there are some other substances that contribute to cooling it. And it turns out that we humans have also been releasing a fair amount of these substances, too. The main example here is sulfur dioxide, which comes from aerosols, the burning of coal, and combustion of diesel fuel or heavy oils. Oh, the irony. It can also come naturally from the eruption of volcanoes, for instance. The effect of sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere is increased reflection of some of the incoming radiation from the sun essentially decreasing the energy absorbed by the planet. However, scientific understanding of the full effects of this molecule, its quantity and its lifespan are still unknown. This will be important to remember when we talk about geoengineering and solar radiation management in chapter 9.

[00:02:52]Moreover, while SO2, sulfur dioxide, may seem like the hero here, it is a major air pollutant that can be harmful to humans and animals, and it can also contribute to the formation of acid rain. The planting of trees, in addition to the benefits from carbon capture and storage due through photosynthesis, also has a cooling effect due to the increase in the amount of energy that Earth's surface bounces back upward. So reforestation initiatives also have the cooling down effect that counters the greenhouse effect. Coincidentally, the substances causing the cooling effects pretty much offset one to one the additional warming effects from the greenhouse gases other than carbon dioxide. Therefore, taking only the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by itself is a pretty good indicator of where we stand in the anthropogenic global warming. And so we are back to the 414 ppm we started this section with. When talking about efforts to stabilize emissions, it's important to understand that there are many different ways to frame the global warming problem which can be confusing.

[00:04:03]Let us try to detangle the possibilities and have a clear understanding of each concept. The first is the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. the around 414 ppm I mentioned earlier. It is a concentration just like the amount of sugar in a cup of coffee or the alcohol content in a can of beer. Next up is the concentration of CO2 plus other greenhouse gases. The CO2 EQ we defined earlier in the atmosphere which is the around 500 ppm.

[00:04:36]Next up is the infamous 51 billion metric tons that starts and conducts the whole storyline in Bill Gates best-selling book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Break It Therroughs We Need.

[00:04:50]This is the total amount of CO2 EQ we emit globally on an annual basis. But this is not a fixed number. When we reach the goal of net zero emissions by 2050, and we better reach net zero by 2050, this means we will have brought the 51 billion number down to zero, and we will have effectively stopped emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. But note that CO2EQ concentration in the atmosphere may very well stay at the same 500 ppm it is currently even if we hit net zero as it's not going anywhere for a long time or not without some kind of huge intervention.

[00:05:32]This is why you'll always hear about us trying to limit the temperature increase and never about us trying to decrease it. It's also possible you'll find the 51 billion metric tonses of CO2 EQ expressed in different units. And there's a bunch of examples that I'm not going to read out loud. He ends with it can be very confusing to have but to bystanders to have these numbers thrown at them. He has a footnote that says never say never. In the last part of the book, we'll look into ways to actually lower the temperature, but they are quite risky and not realistic at this point in time. Moreover, the pandemic brought a slight decrease in emissions from 37 to 34 billion tons per year. It shot right up afterward though. But also, the planet healed quite a lot in the first two months of the pandemic when everything was legitimately shut down, so we know it can happen. I love this book because it is written for non-sciencey people just like me. I'm often asked what I can't do and the answer is science and math. Hash homeschooling. So this is a great book just for that case. We had Dr. Hibedo Giaz on my show Watch Power to talk about this on Earth Day and we will have him back sometime soon. You can get copies of Climate Change attached