July 30th, 2018
Question: “What are the main causes of climate change and why is it so difficult to address this problem? What are the possible second and third order consequences of mitigation and adaptation response strategies that could be implemented to minimize the impacts of climate change?”
I. Introduction
Climate change is happening now. The world is warming, global sea level is rising, and some types of extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and severe. These changes have already resulted in a wide range of impacts across every region of the world and many sectors of global economy. Climate change is affecting human’s life in far-reaching ways, such as human health, agriculture, food security, water supply, transportation, energy, ecosystems, and others. These impacts are expected to become increasingly disruptive throughout this century and beyond. Therefore, the planet needs reliable scientific information about current and potential future changes, impacts and effective response options to reduce the negative impact of climate changes. This paper aims to explore the causes for climate change from an over-arching perspective, the existing challenges to address the climate issues, and the potential solutions that could be applied to address these issues under the current international climate cooperation framework.
II. Main Causes of Climate Change
According to Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), global warming refers to the recent and ongoing rise in global average temperature near Earth’s surface. It’s caused mostly by the increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Climate change refers to any significant change in the measures of climate lasting for an extended period of time. Climate change includes major changes in temperature, precipitation, or wind patterns, among other effects, that occur over several decades or longer.
In general, humans are largely responsible for recent climate change. Over the past century, human activities have released large amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases (GHG) into the atmosphere. The majority of GHG come from burning fossil fuels to producing energy. Deforestation, industrial processes, and some agricultural practices are also the causes for emitting gases into the atmosphere.
Greenhouse Effect
The greenhouse effect refers to the phenomenon where greenhouse gases act like a blanket around Earth, trapping energy in the atmosphere and causing it to warm. The process itself is natural and necessary to support life on Earth, but the exceeding amount of greenhouse gases can change Earth’s climate and result in dangerous effects to human health, welfare as well as the ecosystem.
CO2 levels varied in continuously with the glacial cycles in the past several hundred thousand years. During warm “interglacial” periods, CO2 levels were higher. During cool “glacial” periods, CO2 levels were lower. The heating or cooling of Earth’s surface and oceans can cause changes in the natural resources and sinks of these gases, and thus changes in greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. People think these changing concentrations have acted as a positive feedback, correspondent to the temperature changes by long-term shifts in Earth’s orbits.
The primary activity causing the increasing temperature is greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels. Human activities, such as the burning of fossil fuels and changes in land use, release large amounts of CO2, causing concentrations in the atmosphere to rise. since the Industrial Revolution began around 1750, human activities have contributed substantially to climate change by adding CO2 and other heat-trapping gases to the atmosphere. These greenhouse gas emissions accelerated the greenhouse effect and caused Earth’s surface temperature to rise. Among the main greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide is the primary gas that is contributing to recent climate change. It is absorbed and emitted naturally as part of the carbon cycle, through plant and animal respiration, volcanic eruptions, and ocean-atmosphere exchange.
According to IPCC, human activities currently release over 30 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year.
Methane is produced through both natural and human activities, such as natural wetlands, agricultural activities, and fossil fuel extraction and transport. Due to human activities, CH4 concentrations increased sharply during most of the 20th century and are now more than two and a half times compared to pre-industrial levels.
Nitrous oxide is produced through natural and human activities, mostly through agricultural activities and natural biological processes. The concentrations of N2O have risen approximately 20% since the start of the Industrial Revolution, and it in general has increased more rapidly during the past century than at any time in the past 22,000 years.
Other greenhouse gases also include water vapor, tropospheric ozone (O2), chlorofluorocarbons, hydrochlorofluorocarbons, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, and sulfur hexafluoride. These gases mostly come from chemical production activities, often used in coolants, foaming agents, fire extinguishers, solvents, pesticides, and aerosol propellants. These gases can stay in atmosphere for a very long time, and the emissions will affect the climate for many decades and centuries.
III. Challenges to Address Climate Change
Different perceptions about climate risks lead to variable judgements
Different regions, economic and resource sectors, as well as populations will experience different impacts from climate change. Therefore, their ability to tolerate and adapt to such impacts will differ in their judgements about the potential risks posed by climate change. For example , the expectations of viewing risks of climate change of coastal communities would be much more serious than inland provinces. Individuals and organizations that are heavily invested in carbon-intensive industries may prefer to face the risks of climate change rather than the potential costs of policies to limit GHG emissions. Therefore, decision makers will have to face some difficult trade-offs in seeking to protect the interests of different constituencies.
Moreover, the central government plays a critical leadership role in setting policies that affect the actions of all parts of society. But the specific responsibility and opportunity for responding to climate change rests with local government agencies, and most importantly, with the support of private sector, including capital investments, industrial production and employment. Thus, it is critical for government to respond to climate change policies with careful consideration on how information, incentives and regulations from different levels of governance will most effectively engage and mitigate climate change risks.
The problem of collective action
Another major hurdle for addressing climate change comes from global-scale efforts. There is the wide agreement that limiting the magnitude of climate change will require substantial actions on the part of all major GHG-emitting nations, including both the industrialized nations and the rapidly developing countries whose relative share of global emissions is rapidly increasing. The perspectives vary greatly when it comes to how to define each country’s responsibilities for contributing to the global effort. Some argues that the U.S., as the country with largest historical share of GHG emissions and with one the of highest per capital GHG emission rates, has an obligation to substantially reduce domestic emissions. But others also pointed out the economic disadvantages that a country might face if it committed to significant emission reductions while other countries didn’t. Therefore, forming a strong and credit climate change policy that requires consolidated global cooperation is extremely challenging, but definitely necessary to get to the core of the issue.
Economic challenges on potential solution—carbon trade program
The “carbon trade”—by setting a price on GHG emissions, has always been at the center of discussions for reducing climate change, as it is an efficient way of deploying market incentives to limit emissions. The U.S. has been focusing on designing the program, under which the price of emissions would be market-based. Under this mechanism, companies are allocated allowances limiting them to a certain amount of greenhouse-gas emissions each year. To meet these caps, they must reduce emissions but can also purchase offset credits from climate-friendly projects in exchange for internal emissions reductions. But there are also discussions regarding this trading scheme, where many economists favor more of carbon tax, which they believe would provide price predictability with costs to the economy offset by lowering taxes in other areas. Environmental experts also think that while a tax would provide cost certainty, only a cap-and-trade could provide certainty on minimum emissions reductions.
However, after designing the carbon trade program, people worry more about the possible negative economic impacts. The most difficult challenges come from setting the right price for carbon. The two major carbon markets, the EU Emissions Trading System (EU-ETS), and the UN’s carbon offsetting scheme, Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), are failures. But new carbon markets are still based on these schemes and are being planned in both developed and developing countries. Due to serious recession in many countries in recent years, both schemes have created the oversupply of carbon allowances, allowing cheap carbon credits and making the price of carbon so low that it currently is a negligible cost to industry. Thus, it does not play the role of incentivizing investments in low-carbon technologies. Moreover, from the perspectives of lawmakers and industry leaders in the U.S., it’s more concerned that such greenhouse gas caps in the United States will reduce the ability of U.S. companies to compete with foreign imports, leading U.S. companies to move to countries without greenhouse gas restrictions. But creating such a tariff system among countries would post a number of hurdles. One is to decide how to measure the amount of greenhouse gas being emitted to produce a certain product, as each country will favor a mixture of subsidies, border adjustments and other greenhouse gas controls that foster its own producers.
It is still obvious that a cap-and-trade program will offer potential economic benefits. Caps would provide incentives for energy saving and low-emissions technologies. Revenues from purchasing credits that offset emissions could be used to spur investment in green technologies that will help the economy transition. But there are economic analyses pointing out that GHG fail to account for add-on benefits such as the health consequences of reduced coal use or the geopolitical consequences of moving away from oil consumption. On the other side, the development of green technologies will create new jobs. But it is still debatable that, to what extent will the carbon trade program play the role in incentivizing the market to reduce coal use and heading towards deploying green technologies, given the challenges and failures above.
IV. Solution Strategies to Climate Changes
Based on the above discussions, it is clear that the steady escalation of climate pressure will stretch the resiliency of natural and human systems, making individual regions and their systems more vulnerable to the increasingly frequent extreme weather events. Indeed, climate changes is pushing systems everywhere towards the tipping point.
“Climate change assessment”
Traditional climate change assessments primarily focus on the likely geophysical effects that increasing GHG will have on climate, which falls into the “first order” category to mitigations and adaptations. The “second-order” effects concern the climate changes have on biophysical systems, such as the threats to infrastructure that poses great vulnerability along coasts and the threats to global security. From there, which is the “third-order” effect, is to measure how these effects will in turn changes in patterns for vector-born disease, famines, increased heat deaths, environmental refugees and so on. Most of these effects are related to human activities. The final step, “fourth-order” considers the how political and social systems may react to these effect. To address the effects from the climate change assessment, the methods for mitigating and adapting climate change risks have been developed and applied in the past decades.
Mitigations
Mitigation refers to reducing climate change, which involves reducing the flow of heat-trapping greenhouse gases into atmosphere, either by reducing sources of these GHG, or enhancing the “sinks” that accumulate and store GHG. The goal of mitigation is to avoid significant human interference with the climate system, and “stabilize GHG levels in a timeframe that is sufficient to allow ecosystems to adapt naturally to climate change, ensure that food production is not threatened and to enable economic development to proceed in a sustainable manner.”
Mitigation may require us to use new technologies, clean energy resources to change people’s behavior of consuming energy, or make older technologies more energy efficient. One major thing to conduct mitigation is by switching to low-carbon energy sources, such as wind power, solar, geothermal, hydroelectric or nuclear, to lower the emissions of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. But these technologies sill face barriers when it comes to capital costs, financing, public perception, and a longstanding dependence of markets and institutions on fossil fuels. Some ideas are easy and inexpensive, such as replacing incandescent lights with compact fluorescent bulbs that use less electricity than their conventional counterparts. Many mitigation techniques, such as fuel cells and biofuels, are still in the development phase and will require further research to determine their usefulness and viability. The following bullet points summarize the current key mitigation strategies and practices that are commercially available:
- Energy supply: improve supply and distribution efficiency; fuel switching from coal to gas; nuclear power, renewable heat and power (hydropower, solar, wind, geothermal and bioenergy); combined heat and power; early applications of Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS).
- Transportation: more fuel efficient vehicles, including hybrid, cleaner diesel and biofuels; shifting from road transport to rail and public transportation.
- Buildings: efficient use of lighting and daylight. More efficient electrical appliances and heating & cooling devices; improved cook stoves, insulation, and solar design for heating and cooling.
- Industry: more efficient end-use electrical equipment. Improved heat and power recovery; material recycling and substitution; control of non-CO2 gas emissions; and a wide variety of process technologies used in industry.
- Waste management: increased landfill methane recovery; waste incineration with energy recovery; composting of organic waste; controlled waste water treatment; recycling and waste minimization.
Adaptations
Adaptation indicates adapting life in a changing climate, which involves adjusting to actual or expected future climate. The goal is to reduce our vulnerability to the harmful effects of climate change (such as sea-level encroachment, more intense extreme weather events or food insecurity). Adaptations targets the longer-term plan dealing with climate change risks, which encompasses making the most of any potential beneficial opportunities associated with climate change. Climate change is starting to be factored into a variety of development plans: how to manage the increasingly extreme disasters we are seeing and their associated risks, how to protect coastlines and deal with sea-level encroachment, how to best manage land and forests, how to deal with and plan for reduced water availability, how to develop resilient crop varieties and how to protect energy and public infrastructure.
To enforce adaptation strategies against climate change, governments have been playing a major leading role in identifying, designing and implementing adaptation actions. Take European Union for an example, as a leader on advocating for implementing climate change adaptation strategy, EU identified three major objectives: 1) promoting actions by Member States, by providing guidance and funding to help them build up their adaptation capacities and take action; 2) promoting better informed decision-making, by addressing gaps in knowledge about among different stakeholders in Europe, such as establishing the European Climate Adaptation Platform; 3) promoting adaptation strategies in key vulnerable sectors, through agriculture, fisheries and cohesion policy, ensuring that Europe’s infrastructure is made more resilient, and encouraging the use of insurance against natural and man-made disasters. Based on this framework, there would be a variety of specific strategies regarding different aspects, including air, water, waste, public health, infrastructure, storm water, land use, etc.
Australia, as another country that is vulnerable to climate changes, has also presented a good case to address climate resilience and adaptation strategy. Each year, the Australian government issued the Adaptation Strategy for a sustainable climate resilient future with specific goals and actions to manage the climate risks. Similar to European Union, Australia identifies the guiding principles, but more focuses on laying out the next-step strategies that could be put into practices. It looks at current adaptation resilience initiatives across key factors, including coasts, cities and the built environment, agriculture, forestry and fisheries, water resource, natural ecosystems, health and wellbeing, disaster risk management. Overall, all these factors combined is to create a resilient and secure region again climate changes. The Australian government established this strategy and action summary in priority areas and industry for future consultation and actions, with the vision to support prosperity and wellbeing in Australia and beyond, by building the resilience of communities, the economy and the environment to a variable and changing climate.
These strategies intend to inform and assist communities to identify potential alternatives, and to help communities consider possible ways to address anticipated current and future threats resulting from the changing climate.
V. Conclusion
So far, solving climate change is probably one of the largest human’s challenges. Caused largely by the burning of fossil fuels, which currently underline most of modern society’s energy system, the solutions are economically, politically and socially complex. Moreover, the problem’s transnational and transgenerational nature contributes further to the challenge of creating positive coalitions for change and consolidating agreements among nations to act now for benefits later. Thus, it is challenging to move ahead on the international climate negotiations. But the threat of climate change requires urgent action and creative thinking. The climate community should study other regimes that could hold relevant lessons for the climate negotiations, and to seek out new ideas that can be pursued within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The climate change matters to all humans. Yet, if policymakers do not step up with much bolder and ambitious commitments soon, it will likely be too late. Innovations are needed spur more effective and creative methods to address this pressing global threats.
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