1,172 research outputs found
No way out? The double-bind in seeking global prosperity alongside mitigated climate change
In a prior study, I introduced a simple economic growth model designed to be
consistent with general thermodynamic laws. Unlike traditional economic models,
civilization is viewed only as a well-mixed global whole with no distinction
made between individual nations, economic sectors, labor, or capital
investments. At the model core is an observationally supported hypothesis that
the global economy's current rate of primary energy consumption is tied through
a constant to a very general representation of its historically accumulated
wealth. Here, this growth model is coupled to a linear formulation for the
evolution of globally well-mixed atmospheric CO2 concentrations. While very
simple, the coupled model provides faithful multi-decadal hindcasts of
trajectories in gross world product (GWP) and CO2. Extending the model to the
future, the model suggests that the well-known IPCC SRES scenarios
substantially underestimate how much CO2 levels will rise for a given level of
future economic prosperity. For one, global CO2 emission rates cannot be
decoupled from wealth through efficiency gains. For another, like a long-term
natural disaster, future greenhouse warming can be expected to act as an
inflationary drag on the real growth of global wealth. For atmospheric CO2
concentrations to remain below a "dangerous" level of 450 ppmv, model forecasts
suggest that there will have to be some combination of an unrealistically rapid
rate of energy decarbonization and nearly immediate reductions in global
civilization wealth. Effectively, it appears that civilization may be in a
double-bind. If civilization does not collapse quickly this century, then CO2
levels will likely end up exceeding 1000 ppmv; but, if CO2 levels rise by this
much, then the risk is that civilization will gradually tend towards collapse
Novel basis for interpreting recent acceleration of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions
Journal ArticleThis paper presents a simple thermodynamic model for understanding economic and carbon dioxide emissions growth
Gains in economic energy efficiency as the impetus for increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide
Journal ArticleGrowth of anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions is frequently diagnosed as a product of population, per capita economic production, the energy intensity of economic production (or inverse of its energy efficiency), and the carbon intensity of energy. This paper introduces an alternative, prognostic emissions model that accounts for human system feedbacks: economic production adds to a generalized form of infrastructure; infrastructure enables energy consumption through a constant of proportionality; in return, energy consumption powers economic production: CO2 is emitted as the waste-product. Core assumptions in the model are shown to be supported by economic records from recent decades, implying that, perhaps surprisingly, it is the growing energy efficiency of the economy, not increasing population or standard of living, that most directly explains accelerating CO2 emissions. Thus, further increases in energy efficiency are likely to backfire as a mitigation strategy. Instead, any strategy for limiting future atmospheric CO2 emissions requires strong and accelerating reductions in the carbon content of energ
Are there basic physical constraints on future anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide?
Global Climate Models (GCMs) provide forecasts of future climate warming
using a wide variety of highly sophisticated anthropogenic CO2 emissions models
as input, each based on the evolution of four emissions "drivers": population
p, standard of living g, energy productivity (or efficiency) f and energy
carbonization c. The range of scenarios considered is extremely broad, however,
and this is a primary source of forecast uncertainty. Here, it is shown both
theoretically and observationally how the evolution of the human system can be
considered from a surprisingly simple thermodynamic perspective in which it is
unnecessary to explicitly model two of the emissions drivers: population and
standard of living. Specifically, the human system grows through a
self-perpetuating feedback loop in which the consumption rate of primary energy
resources stays tied to the historical accumulation of global economic
production - or p times g - through a time-independent factor of 9.7 +/- 0.3
milliwatts per inflation-adjusted 1990 US dollar. This important constraint,
and the fact that f and c have historically varied rather slowly, points
towards substantially narrowed visions of future emissions scenarios for
implementation in GCMs.Comment: 18 pages including 5 figures, 1 table, and appendices Accepted on 27
August 2009 to Climatic Chang
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