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