Two weeks ago, thousands of illegally hacked emails from a British climate research center were dumped on a Russian webserver, timed to influence the politics of of the international climate negotiations commencing next week in Copenhagen, Denmark. Beginning Thanksgiving week, conservative media and Republican politicians have compared the climate scientists whose private emails were hacked to Hitler, Stalin, and eugenicists, saying they are involved in a global conspiracy to defraud and possibly take over the world. The Climategate “scandal” — a swiftboating intimidation and smear campaign against science — is the right-wing rage from Stephen Dubner to Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck to Lou Dobbs. Like the original Watergate scandal involving right-wing operatives who burglarized the offices of their political opponents, the real crime is the original break-in.

Now, I haven’t been reading that much about this, because after determining that it wasn’t a big deal, I was not interested in hearing more right-wing hysteria. But as I understand it, the scientists in question were merely sexifying their data in order to make trends clearer. Furthermore, they weren’t doing so arbitrarily like so many of us would be prone to do, but instead were applying specific algorithms.
Also, as Jeff Masters of Weather Underground is quoted on Climate Progress, “Even if every bit of mud slung at these scientists were true, the body of scientific work supporting the theory of human-caused climate change—which spans hundreds of thousands of scientific papers written by tens of thousands of scientists in dozens of different scientific disciplines—is too vast to be budged by the flaws in the works of the three or four scientists.”

Frankly, I’m pretty frustrated with our country’s traditional media for not asserting this point more into their conversations. David Roberts puts it really well (as he always does):

[The right-wing noise machine] is an industry that uses dishonesty to defend corporations. Plain and simple. Everyone ought to know that by now and it ought to frame media coverage of these dreary “skeptic” controversies. Yet the press seems to think that every new claim or contrived controversy from the industry deserves to be met with the same furrowed brow, the same quote and counter-quote presentation of “sides,” the same chin-scratching atmospherics of doubt. It’s always the world’s scientists and scientific institutions being asked to defend their integrity, not the professional dissemblers and character assassins.

We just need to keep these points in mind when we watch, read, or listen to the news these days, I guess.

We have to bring down the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere to between 350-450 parts per million (ppm) to avoid the hellish worst of climate change. Economically and technologically, this is quite doable. However, it is not plausible in the current political climate. Because the alternative is unacceptable, we will get there, but to do so we must all become familiar with the best solutions, and then loudly push our political leaders toward them.

The solution is centered around achieving ~14 “stabilization wedges”. One wedge = one billion fewer metric tons of CO2 emitted globally, compared to projected levels. Again, this is possible with current technologies, and has a net cost of zero. The basic strategy is to replace all coal as quickly as possible, and to electrify transportation as much as possible.

Though there’s no silver bullet, but there is “one” solution: we must deploy every conceivable energy-efficient and low carbon technology that we have today as fast as we can. In order to reach the target carbon concentration of 350ppm, we have to deploy all 14 wedges of energy savings by 2040. Though increasingly serious implementation will begin soon, starting around 2030 multiple climate-caused catastrophes will cause drastic measures unthinkable today to be implemented. We must reverse the trend of increasing emissions by 2015-2020 at the latest, and we must have substantial action before 2012 or we’re toast.

There are about 18 wedges possible, and we need about 14 of them to succeed. Here are the options:

Currently available (14.5):

• 1 wedge – albedo change through white roofs and pavement ( “soft geo-engineering” )
• 1 wedge – vehicle efficiency: 60mpg standard for all cars, no increase in miles driven
• 2 wedges – wind: two million large wind turbines
• 3 wedges – Concentrated Solar Power aka Solar Baseload
• 3 wedges – energy efficiency: one each for buildings, industry, and cogeneration/heat-recovery (also geothermal heat pumps)
• 1 wedge – solar photovoltaics (PV)
• 2 wedges – end deforestation AND plant new trees covering an area the size of the United States
• 1 wedge – massive conservation post-2030
• 1/2 wedge – nuclear (more not plausible, and it’s expensive, too)

Requiring more R&D (4):

• 1 wedge – geothermal & other ocean-based renewables (wave, tidal, ocean thermal)
• 1 wedge – coal with biomass cofiring WITH carbon capture & sequestration (more not plausible, and it’s expensive, too)
• 1/2 wedge – next-generation nuclear
• 1/2 wedge – cellulosic biofuels for long-distance transport & remaining aviation
• 1 wedge – soil & biochar

There will, of course, be substantial up-front investments. However, they are a drop in the bucket of global GDP: 1.1%, or approximately one trillion dollars per year.

The IPCC, The McKinsey Global Institute, and the conservative International Energy Agency all report that the cost of this strategy will reduce global GDP by less than $1 for every $10,000. Because the huge costs of dealing with climate change will largely be avoided by this strategy, it is a net gain for the global and US economies.

For more detail, see the original posts, here, here, and here.