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As Congress begins to draft and discuss climate legislation, could the United States get a jump-start on scaling back the effects of climate change by regulating black carbon? During today's OnPoint, Durwood Zaelke, president and founder of the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development, explains how the regulation of black carbon could play a significant role in slowing the nation's pace toward certain irreversible climate tipping points. Zaelke explains why he believes the Montreal Protocol can help mitigate climate change. He also weighs in on the domestic and international climate debates.
Monica Trauzzi: Welcome to the show. I'm Monica Trauzzi. With us today is Durwood Zaelke, president and founder of the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development. Durwood, thanks for coming on the show.
Durwood Zaelke: Thank you for having me.
Monica Trauzzi: Durwood, as the U.S. begins to draft and debate climate legislation and with international negotiations right around the corner you're calling on the international community to take faster action on the climate, apart from these legislative approaches, in order to protect us from reaching certain tipping points. Talk a bit about how close we are to reaching these tipping points and what it means for the climate discussion if and once we do.
Durwood Zaelke: OK, thank you, this is the central question that I focus on. We are committed as of emissions of greenhouse gases from 2005 to a warming of 2.4 degrees Celsius. That's in the pipeline and will be expressed largely within the next 50 years, all of it within the next century, this century. Now that is comprised of about 0.78 degrees Celsius that is the observed warming, another 0.6 is temporarily stored in the oceans and then an additional 1degree of warming that currently is being hidden or masked by our emissions of the cooling aerosols, mostly sulfates. So, as we reduce aggressively the sulfates around the world for public health reasons we are exposing this additional 1degree. Now that 2.4 degrees total puts us squarely in the middle of predicted tipping points for abrupt climate changes that starts with the loss of the summer sea ice in the Arctic. This is dangerous because as we lose that summer sea ice we expose dark water underneath which absorbs more heat and sets off the Arctic amplification. As that begins we have increasing or accelerating feedbacks that will begin to threaten the release of methane from ocean hydrates and from permafrost. Then we have the melting or deglaciation of the Hindu Kush Tibetan Plateau in the Himalayas, which is the headwater for virtually every major river of Asia. The IPCC, which is generally conservative, predicts that we will lose 80 percent of that snow and ice in this plateau in 21 years, by the year 2030. That's the water supply for up to 2 billion people, including three nuclear powers who will be fighting over dwindling water supplies. Then you move on to the die off or die back of the Amazon forest as another tipping point, the slowdown of thermal haline heat conveyor, changes in monsoon seasons as well. And then you move toward the extreme possibility of the melting or even before this the deglaciation of the Greenland ice sheet. That's sooner than you might think, and finally the West Antarctic ice sheet. So these tipping points are coming and we're already in the zone of committed warming for these tipping points. Now, the next point that's critical for this is that to go backwards to where Jim Hansen tells us we need to go to 350 parts per million of CO2 equivalent, maximum 300 to 350 maximum of CO2 concentration, we can't rely just on cutting CO2 emissions. As important as that is, and it's absolutely critical we must do that, but cutting CO2 emissions does not produce significant cooling for at least a thousand years. This is the new paper by Susan Solomon and her colleagues from the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This is a pretty startling phenomena, that we are in the zone of tipping points with 2.4 degrees of committed warming, and cutting CO2 emissions, as important as it is, won't be able to bring us back from that 2.4.
Monica Trauzzi: So, walk us through then what governments should be doing.
Durwood Zaelke: OK, so that's the $64,000 question as we used to say and there are two main levers of governance that we can pull. The first one is to focus on the reduction of non-CO2 climate forcing agents and I'll start with black carbon or soot, which is an aerosol, right now is not in the international negotiations or in the national climate plans because it's an aerosol, not a gas and because we have generally considered it only under local air pollution regulation and only for public health purposes. But it's significant. Jim Hansen, Professor Ramanathan at Scripps Institute at University of California San Diego, Zander, Jacobson, Tami Bond, a whole collection of very talented atmospheric scientists say it may be the second most important climate forcing agent. And it is particularly damaging for the Arctic, for Greenland, and for the Himalayan Hindu Kush Tibetan Plateau. Black carbon works its dirty work in two ways. It absorbs heat from above as an aerosol and when it's deposited on snow and ice it darkens them and then causes the absorption of more sunlight, so it accelerates melting of snow and ice. Second, I would go after and am proposing that we address HFCs, hydrofluorocarbons now, under the Kyoto protocol. But they are a substitute for CFCs and HCFCs, which are regulated under the Montreal Protocol Ozone Treaty. That treaty, by the way, is the best environmental treaty we've ever created and also the best climate treaty we've created so far. It has caused climate mitigation of about 11 giga-tons per year, between 1990 and 2010. That's a tremendous amount. I mean we're asking Kyoto to deliver 5 gigatons if we're lucky. And if you count the emission acceleration since 1990 it will be about 2 gigatons per year, so that's for a total of 10. That's not very much compared to what we've gotten out of Montreal. So we should move HFCs from Kyoto, put them in Montreal, where we've already phased out 97 chemicals by 97 percent. This treaty knows what it's doing. It knows how to take regulatory action to get the result it needs.
Monica Trauzzi: Have you seen momentum from the U.S. and European governments to do any of what you're proposing?
Durwood Zaelke: Yes, I have. I'm happy to say that the Europeans in their Council of Europe communication on their negotiating strategy and their negotiating goals for Copenhagen on March 2, just last week, said they would like to see an international arrangement to phase down HFCs agreed to at Copenhagen. That's very, very important. The U.S. is also considering doing this and they've had one stakeholder meeting with EPA and the State Department. So there's momentum building for this. This could be one of the victories that we get at Copenhagen. There's a second lever that we can do. There are other things in the non-CO2 basket. We need to go after perfluorocarbon, PFCs. They have an atmospheric lifetime of 50,000 years. It's irresponsible to emit them at all and sulfur hexafluoride, atmospheric lifetime of 3500 years. We should not be letting these chemicals out if we can possibly help it. We should use regulatory structures to phase them down to the minimal critical use that we need and there may be some minimal, critical use. Tropospheric ozone we could reduce and that's fast mitigation. Methane, quite fast as well, atmospheric lifetime of maybe 10 to 12 years. So in that non-CO2 basket, there are very good things we can do, again, recognizing that CO2 emission cuts don't reduce cooling for a thousand years.
Monica Trauzzi: The focus is however on CO2, domestically and internationally. I sort of want to get your thoughts on how the international process is going and the international negotiations are going. There's a lot of pressure on the U.S. this year to sort of be the leader at the Copenhagen negotiations. Do you think that the U.S. is going to be able to meet the expectations that the international community is putting on this country?
Durwood Zaelke: High expectations. Let me just finish the other point, the second lever we can pull is bio sequestration. We need to protect and expand our forests. We need to improve our agricultural practices, and we need to produce bio-char. This is the process where you hydrolyze or basically cook with low oxygen any biomass to make fine-grained charcoal that you can put back in the soil as a soil enhancement and it provides permanent carbon storage. That's the only strategy, this bio sequestration that can take us backwards because it can suck out CO2 from the atmosphere and put it back into permanent storage. So we need to do those two, non-CO2 and bio sequestration. Now, the world needs the U.S. and I was in the UNEP governing council meeting in Nairobi two weeks ago. This is the environment ministers of the world, they have many climate negotiators and the U.S., for the first time in many, many years stood up and said, I'm paraphrasing, they didn't say it quite like this, but by their actions they said we will lead again on environmental protection at the international level and the other negotiators all responded so quickly and favorably. This was on mercury phase down and other things that we're doing through UNEP. But you could see it immediately how the international community responded to the U.S. coming back into the game to help. It's not just leadership, but it's a colleague who comes in and says we will help do the heavy lifting again because we're good at this. We've learned, in our domestic legislation, how to protect our environment. We do a brilliant job and now we bring that, once again, to the international level. Will the international community get everything it wants out of the new administration? Perhaps not, but they're confident that the U.S. will do what it can do. We have a Senate that we have to satisfy if we want ratification. We have a global economic crisis that the whole world has to solve at the same time, so we need to do the things that we can start today, that we can get better at as we go on and that we can lay down the tracks so when we do decide we're going to pull these other levers as hard as we can we're ready to do it and to go to global scale. And I think we're getting close to that posture.
Monica Trauzzi: OK, we're going to have to end it right there on that note.
Durwood Zaelke: OK.
Monica Trauzzi: Thank you for coming on the show.
Durwood Zaelke: Thank you for having me.
Monica Trauzzi: And thanks for watching. We'll see you back here tomorrow.
[End of Audio]
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