Abstract
The very long-term consequences of climate change have received relatively little attention. Most projections of global warming focus on what will happen by the year 2100 or on the effects of a doubling of CO2 from preindustrial levels. This is a serious shortcoming, since integrated carbon-climate models project that if CO2 from current in situ fossil fuel resources continues to be released into the atmosphere, the concentration of atmospheric CO2 could exceed 1400 ppm by the year 2300 and the earth could be 8 °C or more warmer. Even at today’s CO2 levels, over the next few hundred years, sea levels will rise by tens of meters. If a significant fraction of currently recoverable fossil fuels is burned, the consequences will be dire. Extreme heat and increased weather volatility will destabilize agricultural production. This chapter discusses the importance of climate change on past human biological and social evolution, looks at various long-run scenarios for future CO2 and temperature increases, and discusses long-run climate change policies in the context of the sustainability debate.
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Notes
- 1.
The IPCC’s Representative Concentration Pathways are the most frequently used scenarios of future climate change. The number attached to a particular pathway (RCP8.5 for example) indicates the projected amount of radiative forcing from various kinds of greenhouse gas sources in the year 2100. Scenarios range from RCP2.6 (very aggressive mitigation polices and a rapid phase out of fossil fuel use) to RCP8.5 that assumes continued exponential economic growth, an expansion of coal use, and no significant mitigation policies. All scenarios except RCP8.5 assume some form of geoengineering to remove CO2 directly from the atmosphere. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_Concentration_Pathway
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Acknowledgments
This chapter is dedicated to the memory of Conrad (Koni) Steffen, former director of the Wald, Schnee, and Landscaft Institute in Zurich, Switzerland. Koni was one of the world’s foremost authorities on the effects of climate change on glaciers. He died in an accident at his research station in Greenland on August 9, 2020.
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Gowdy, J. (2021). Facing the Mega-Greenhouse: Climate Change Polices for the Very Long Run. In: Lackner, M., Sajjadi, B., Chen, WY. (eds) Handbook of Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6431-0_104-1
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