Fear and Loathing on the Hockey Stick of Doom
Why was Charney so uncannily right back in 1979 when he estimated that doubling the stock of atmospheric carbon will increase global surface temperatures by 3ºC (plus/minus 1.5ºC)?
Since then vast armies of climate scientists have replicated the result. Study after study has found that the equilibrium climate sensitivity — how much will temperatures rise after accounting for feedback loops — to be basically in line with Charney's original estimate. Put simply, Charney (1979) is the most replicated scientific result of all time. Tabulated results of 142 independent scientific investigations since 2000 can be found here. Figure 1 displays the means.
There is, of course, uncertainty around these estimates. A recent meta study in Nature explained that while climate scientists have not been able to narrow the confidence intervals, there is now considerably greater confidence in those intervals. In fact, the uncertainty points to catastrophic heavy tail risks. Put simply, 3ºC is the baseline scenario, it may be considerably worse. The risk we face may turn out to as effective as the expenditure of all thermonuclear weapons in great power arsenals.
Of course, we are not dumping carbon into the atmosphere at the same rate over time. No sir, we are on the hockey stick. This means that doubling times become shorter and shorter as we ride the exponential curve up to our doom. When Charney made his calculations in 1979 we were dumping 5 billion metric tons per annum into the atmosphere. Now we are dumping 10 billion metric tons every year.
But the planet does not care about the rate of emissions. What matters is the stock of carbon in the atmosphere; that's what governs the degree of warming. As long as more is flowing from the tap (our emissions) into the tub (atmospheric stock of carbon) than is being drained by the sink (rain forests and oceans et cetera), the water level in the tub will keep rising. And it the doubling stock of carbon that Charney predicted would yield 3ºC warming of global surface temperatures.
How fast are we adding to the stock of carbon in the atmosphere is well captured by an exponential curve with growth parameter 0.022248 per annum, initialized at 280 particles per million (ppm) in the year 1800. In the past thirty years, 1990-2020, we've added as much to this stock as we did in the two centuries before. And we are on course to add the same amount in the next 18 years. If we do that, planetary catastrophe is all but certain.
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The insidious nature of the hockey stick can be seen by looking at thirty-year additions to the stock of doom. If we keep going, we will add as much in the next thirty years as we have so far in all of human history. Because of the magic of compounding, we are in fact on course to achieve Charney's doubling by mid-century.
Greta Thunberg is right. 'Our leaders are acting like children,' says the 16-year-old. Not only must we 'do something', the scale of the looming catastrophe is such that every other policy goal must now be subordinated to this goal. There is very little slack. This is no longer about 2100, or even 2050. We have ten years. Unless we can reach a far-reaching global accord and transform the world economy beyond recognition in the coming decade, it's over. We will be well and truly fucked. There will simply be no way to avoid catastrophic scenarios. By 2030, only the scale and depth of the catastrophe will still be up for negotiation.
The planetary catastrophe approaching exponentially fast may be framed in many ways. All reference frames draw our attention on some issues while leaving others out of focus. We may think in terms of the Anthropocene. That leaves out the real culprits responsible for the mess. We may see this as the closing of the global frontier; as the coda of the Capitalocene. This approach allows us see how the planetary crisis is tied at the hip to questions of economic and social justice. The most advanced version of this frame may be found in the work of Alyssa Battistoni. The fact that the planetary impasse is entangled with so many other important issues only raises the stakes of the fight.
It may sound parochial and misguided at first sight, but the only way to a credible solution is all-out securitization. Specifically, given the topology of global power and the matrix of global politics, the planetary impasse must now be recognized as the principal threat to US national security. Put simply, the planetary impasse trumps China, salafi jihadism, nuclear proliferation, right-wing populism, and every other threat by orders of magnitude. It must become the lodestar of US foreign policy and the organizing principle of US grand-strategy. For the foreseeable future the goal of US grand-strategy must be to obtain a credible solution to the planetary impasse. Everything else must be subordinated to this goal. This will require the United States to forgo other interests. In particular, this will require a far-reaching modus vivendi with China. The US national security and foreign policy community needs to get its head out of its ass. Our kids can live with an authoritarian China, even one that dominates the Western Pacific. But they cannot live with a China powered by coal-fired plants.
China produces 30 percent of the world's emissions, twice as much as the United States and as much as the US, UK, Japan, Germany, France, Italy, Australia, and Canada combined. The following table displays global contributions. The import could not be more obvious. It is mathematically impossible for the West to solve this problem on its own. That's Toozian pessimism. Given the scale of the challenges facing the rising nations, particularly given the strength of the social forces now evident in India and China, the greatest challenge for a future social democratic administration will be persuading the rising powers to subordinate their national goals to the planetary goal. Make no mistake: This is going to be a very, very hard nut to crack. It will require tremendous flexibility — in terms of fiscal transfers, technology transfers, and geopolitical accommodation. But we have run out of options. There is no alternative to a far-reaching global accord. And this will consume every last ounce of energy of the next administration, with little bandwidth left to deal with even the most pressing of the other issues. This is as it should be. The ultimate objective of grand-strategy has always been, and will always be, survival.
Postscript. But the most important reason why securitization is the right discursive strategy has to do with the structure of political discourse in the United States. It will not be enough to win the Presidency and change the balance of power in Congress. For even after you've done that you will still have to fight and defeat vast forces that will be mobilized to throw a wrench in the attempted transformation. The forces opposed to any serious action are so powerful that they managed to impose discipline on the Republican party; discipline that became manifest in the party's reversal on climate change after John McCain's failed bid for the White House. They will mobilize their practically limitless resources. They will pay a thousands pens to write and a thousand heads to talk. Their discursive strategy can be predicted in advance: "Hard-working Americans need jobs." That's precisely why it has to become a question of national security. For there is no other retort to "Your plan threatens American jobs" than "It's a question of national security."
Only national security trumps the discourse that has long been used to shut down green initiatives. The fact that the planetary impasse is a threat to the security of all nations should not distract us from the discursive solution that was discovered by Truman. Whether or not a Cold War was necessary, the discourse of the Cold War (the reproduction of the image of the Soviet Union as a first-order threat to US national security) was necessary to get Congress to authorize and American people to pay for a military instrument called for by the grand-strategy of containment.
With the Soviet capitulation, panic set in. The diachronic pattern reveals the structure at play. 'I am running out of demons', wailed Colin Powell. Defense intellectuals tried 'military sophistication of Third World dictators', 'weapon states', 'backlash states', and the one that stuck, 'rogue states'. The combined GDP of all "rogues" never exceeded that of New York. It's within the envelope of this rigidity that the United States will find its own foot in 2003. The problem was obvious. The goal of the discourse disguised as grand-strategy was to defend the military instrument from Congress and the American people. Grand-strategy dictates the military instrument; not the other way around.
At the present conjuncture, securitization is over determined by (not entirely) exogenous developments in Asia. China produced more concrete in two years than the United States did in the entire twentieth century. It is perhaps only to be expected that containment would come back on the agenda. Even though Martin Wolf kicked it off splendidly, there was a problem. Was it even possible for the West to out-compete China? Wolf appealed to the liberal democratic discourse. But there was a whiff of absurdity in the air. We know that there will only be one exit from Cold War, detente, for neither great power can be eliminated. That offers the obvious prospect of using the future to discount the medium term by going straight to detente. We may call that a modus vivendi sensu stricto.
US foreign policy in the planetary impasse calls for a wholesale reorientation of grand-strategy. There is no other solution to the planetary impasse. The question is not if but when. The United States will be eventually forced to treat the planetary impasse as the overriding national security priority. But if it does so later it will be exponentially worse off because of the nature of the hockey stick. Recall that the exponential grows faster than all polynomials of degree n for n=1,…,∞. How much worse will we be by starting off at a later time T > 0? The answer is literally exp(a*T)/a, where a is estimated to be around 0.022248=12*0.001854, as below.
Carbon Emissions. Rank Nation Percent Emissions 1 China 30.16% 2806634 2 UNITED STATES 15.40% 1432855 3 INDIA 6.56% 610411 4 RUSSIA 5.00% 465052 5 JAPAN 3.56% 331074 6 GERMANY 2.11% 196314 7 IRAN 1.90% 177115 8 SAUDI ARABIA 1.76% 163907 9 South Korea 1.72% 160119 10 CANADA 1.57% 146494 11 BRAZIL 1.55% 144480 12 SOUTH AFRICA 1.44% 133562 13 MEXICO 1.41% 130971 14 INDONESIA 1.36% 126582 15 UNITED KINGDOM 1.23% 114486 16 AUSTRALIA 1.06% 98517 17 TURKEY 1.01% 94350 18 Italy 0.94% 87377 19 THAILAND 0.93% 86232 20 France 0.89% 82704 21 POLAND 0.84% 77922 22 Taiwan 0.77% 72013 23 KAZAKHSTAN 0.73% 67716 24 MALAYSIA 0.71% 66218 25 SPAIN 0.69% 63806 26 UKRAINE 0.67% 61985 27 UNITED ARAB EMIRATES 0.62% 57641 28 ARGENTINA 0.60% 55638 29 EGYPT 0.59% 55057 30 VENEZUELA 0.54% 50510 31 IRAQ 0.49% 45935 32 NETHERLANDS 0.49% 45624 33 Vietnam 0.49% 45517 34 PAKISTAN 0.49% 45350 35 ALGERIA 0.43% 39651 36 QATAR 0.32% 29412 37 PHILIPPINES 0.31% 28812 38 UZBEKISTAN 0.31% 28692 39 CZECH REPUBLIC 0.28% 26309 40 NIGERIA 0.28% 26256 41 KUWAIT 0.28% 26018 42 BELGIUM 0.27% 25457 43 COLOMBIA 0.25% 22932 44 CHILE 0.24% 22515 45 BANGLADESH 0.21% 19959 46 ROMANIA 0.21% 19090 47 TURKMENISTAN 0.20% 18659 48 GREECE 0.20% 18358 49 ISRAEL 0.19% 17617 50 BELARUS 0.19% 17316 51 PERU 0.18% 16838 52 OMAN 0.18% 16681 53 MOROCCO 0.18% 16325 54 AUSTRIA 0.17% 16011 55 Libya 0.17% 15543 56 SINGAPORE 0.17% 15373 57 NORWAY 0.14% 12988 58 FINLAND 0.14% 12899 59 TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO 0.14% 12619 60 HONG KONG SPECIAL ADMINSTRATIVE REGION OF CHINA 0.14% 12605 61 PORTUGAL 0.13% 12286 62 ECUADOR 0.13% 11977 63 SWEDEN 0.13% 11841 64 BULGARIA 0.12% 11567 65 HUNGARY 0.12% 11477 66 North Korea 0.12% 11052 67 SERBIA 0.11% 10272 68 AZERBAIJAN 0.11% 10223 69 SWITZERLAND 0.10% 9628 70 CUBA 0.10% 9500 71 ANGOLA 0.10% 9480 72 NEW ZEALAND 0.10% 9453 73 IRELAND 0.10% 9290 74 DENMARK 0.10% 9135 75 BAHRAIN 0.09% 8546 76 Syria 0.09% 8373 77 SLOVAKIA 0.09% 8366 78 TUNISIA 0.08% 7862 79 JORDAN 0.08% 7213 80 LEBANON 0.07% 6564 81 YEMEN 0.07% 6190 82 BOSNIA and HERZEGOVINA 0.07% 6063 83 Burma 0.06% 5899 84 DOMINICAN REPUBLIC 0.06% 5874 85 MONGOLIA 0.06% 5683 86 BOLIVIA 0.06% 5566 87 ESTONIA 0.06% 5323 88 SRI LANKA 0.05% 5016 89 GUATEMALA 0.05% 4998 90 CROATIA 0.05% 4593 91 SUDAN 0.05% 4190 92 GHANA 0.04% 3945 93 KENYA 0.04% 3896 94 LITHUANIA 0.04% 3501 95 SLOVENIA 0.04% 3494 96 ZIMBABWE 0.04% 3278 97 ETHIOPIA 0.03% 3163 98 TANZANIA 0.03% 3153 99 COTE DE IVOIRE 0.03% 3012 100 AFGHANISTAN 0.03% 2675 101 LUXEMBOURG 0.03% 2634 102 KYRGYZSTAN 0.03% 2620 103 HONDURAS 0.03% 2583 104 BRUNEI (DARUSSALAM) 0.03% 2484 105 GEORGIA 0.03% 2451 106 SENEGAL 0.03% 2415 107 PANAMA 0.03% 2400 108 MOZAMBIQUE 0.02% 2298 109 NEPAL 0.02% 2190 110 COSTA RICA 0.02% 2116 111 MACEDONIA 0.02% 2048 112 JAMAICA 0.02% 2024 113 BOTSWANA 0.02% 1918 114 REPUBLIC OF CAMEROON 0.02% 1910 115 LATVIA 0.02% 1902 116 URUGUAY 0.02% 1840 117 CAMBODIA 0.02% 1823 118 BENIN 0.02% 1723 119 PAPUA NEW GUINEA 0.02% 1723 120 EL SALVADOR 0.02% 1714 121 CYPRUS 0.02% 1653 122 CURACAO 0.02% 1604 123 ALBANIA 0.02% 1559 124 PARAGUAY 0.02% 1555 125 ARMENIA 0.02% 1508 126 EQUATORIAL GUINEA 0.02% 1458 127 UGANDA 0.02% 1426 128 GABON 0.02% 1416 129 TAJIKISTAN 0.02% 1415 130 REPUBLIC OF MOLDOVA 0.01% 1345 131 NICARAGUA 0.01% 1326 132 DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO (FORMERLY ZAIRE) 0.01% 1274 133 ZAMBIA 0.01% 1228 134 NEW CALEDONIA 0.01% 1170 135 MAURITIUS 0.01% 1153 136 REUNION 0.01% 1138 137 NAMIBIA 0.01% 1024 138 CONGO 0.01% 844 139 MADAGASCAR 0.01% 839 140 HAITI 0.01% 780 141 BURKINA FASO 0.01% 777 142 OCCUPIED PALESTINIAN TERRITORY 0.01% 774 143 MAURITANIA 0.01% 739 144 TOGO 0.01% 715 145 GUADELOUPE 0.01% 700 146 LESOTHO 0.01% 673 147 GUINEA 0.01% 668 148 BAHAMAS 0.01% 659 149 MALTA 0.01% 640 150 MARTINIQUE 0.01% 627 151 MONTENEGRO 0.01% 603 152 NIGER 0.01% 580 153 GUYANA 0.01% 548 154 SURINAME 0.01% 543 155 ICELAND 0.01% 541 156 LAO PEOPLE S DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC 0.01% 533 157 REPUBLIC OF SOUTH SUDAN 0.00% 408 158 MALI 0.00% 385 159 MALDIVES 0.00% 364 160 SIERRA LEONE 0.00% 357 161 MACAU SPECIAL ADMINSTRATIVE REGION OF CHINA 0.00% 350 162 MALAWI 0.00% 348 163 BARBADOS 0.00% 347 164 SWAZILAND 0.00% 328 165 FIJI 0.00% 319 166 BHUTAN 0.00% 273 167 LIBERIA 0.00% 255 168 ARUBA 0.00% 238 169 RWANDA 0.00% 229 170 FRENCH POLYNESIA 0.00% 219 171 SAINT MARTIN (DUTCH PORTION) 0.00% 200 172 FRENCH GUIANA 0.00% 200 173 CHAD 0.00% 199 174 DJIBOUTI 0.00% 197 175 ERITREA 0.00% 190 176 SOMALIA 0.00% 166 177 FAEROE ISLANDS 0.00% 163 178 BERMUDA 0.00% 157 179 CAYMAN ISLANDS 0.00% 148 180 ANTIGUA & BARBUDA 0.00% 145 181 GIBRALTAR 0.00% 144 182 GAMBIA 0.00% 140 183 GREENLAND 0.00% 138 184 BELIZE 0.00% 135 185 SEYCHELLES 0.00% 135 186 CAPE VERDE 0.00% 134 187 TIMOR-LESTE (FORMERLY EAST TIMOR) 0.00% 128 188 ANDORRA 0.00% 126 189 BURUNDI 0.00% 120 190 SAINT LUCIA 0.00% 111 191 BONAIRE, SAINT EUSTATIUS, AND SABA 0.00% 88 192 CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC 0.00% 82 193 GUINEA BISSAU 0.00% 74 194 PALAU 0.00% 71 195 GRENADA 0.00% 66 196 ST. KITTS-NEVIS 0.00% 63 197 ST. VINCENT & THE GRENADINES 0.00% 57 198 TURKS AND CAICOS ISLANDS 0.00% 56 199 SOLOMON ISLANDS 0.00% 55 200 SAMOA 0.00% 54 201 BRITISH VIRGIN ISLANDS 0.00% 49 202 COMOROS 0.00% 42 203 VANUATU 0.00% 42 204 FEDERATED STATES OF MICRONESIA 0.00% 41 205 ANGUILLA 0.00% 39 206 DOMINICA 0.00% 37 207 TONGA 0.00% 33 208 SAO TOME & PRINCIPE 0.00% 31 209 MARSHALL ISLANDS 0.00% 28 210 ST. PIERRE & MIQUELON 0.00% 21 211 COOK ISLANDS 0.00% 19 212 KIRIBATI 0.00% 17 213 FALKLAND ISLANDS (MALVINAS) 0.00% 15 214 MONTSERRAT 0.00% 13 215 NAURU 0.00% 13 216 LIECHTENSTEIN 0.00% 12 217 WALLIS AND FUTUNA ISLANDS 0.00% 6 218 SAINT HELENA 0.00% 3 219 NIUE 0.00% 3 220 TUVALU 0.00% 3 Source: https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/trends/emis/top2014.tot