Since you're here with us watching SciShow
I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess that you're not
a big skeptic about the climate change.
Of course, whether you understand it or not, it's happening
Though not understanding it could be a particularly big deal if you happen to be a country.
Or someone in charge of one.
Which is why we have the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
An international group of researchers from all kinds of disciplines
to provide neutral scientific information about climate change for the governments of the world.
Its first assessment report was published in 1990
and key policy makers from all over the world have been more or less ignoring them ever since.
This week, the IPCC released its latest report written by 235 scientists from 58 countries.
But, instead of just laying out data about the mess that we're in
this time, they also tell us what we need to do in order to save ourselves from ourselves.
The report has gotten a lot of attention because a few of the suggestions seem pretty radical to some
but they might turn out to not be radical enough.
According to their findings, emissions of carbon dioxide, the most prevalent green house gas,
increased faster between 2000 and 2010 then it did over the previous 30 years.
The fastest in human history.
Over the past decade, we've released the equivalent of 1 gigaton of CO2 each year
even after all the steps we've taken to try to cut our emissions.
Because of this, scientists say by the end of this century,
global surface temperatures are set to increase between 3.7 and 7.8 degrees Celsius
from their pre-industrial levels.
7.8 degrees, by the way, would be almost 3 degrees worse than the worst case scenario
predicted by the IPCC's inaugural report nearly 25 years ago.
In order to even have a 50/50 chance of avoiding the agreed- upon danger threshold of a 2 degrees increase,
we need to triple the proportion of energy we're getting from low carbon resources.
Which, obviously, is not going to be easy.
Nearly 40% of the world's energy still comes from coal and only about 0.11% of the energy in the United States
comes from solar power.
But we do have options, if we choose to use them.
One avenue the IPCC urges is Carbon Capture and Storage, or CCS,
which has the potential to make fossil fuels, like coal and natural gas, safe for continued use,
at least for the next few decades.
In CCS, you take the exhaust from fossil fuel burning plants and pass it through a solvent
that binds to CO2.
While the rest of the gas is vented, the CO2-rich solvent is drawn off and the carbon dioxide can then be used for making stuff.
Like fertilizer or buried under a layer of impermeable rock.
The point is it stays out of the atmosphere.
But according to the report, we've reached the point where we not only need to reduce our emissions,
we also need to start sucking CO2 back out of the air.
The most effective way of doing that is by letting trees do what trees do best
and clean up our mess for us.
So, the IPCC is emphasizing afforestation, which as opposed to reforestation,
involves planting forests where there have been none before.
This is one of the cheapest solutions available, they point out,
and it could save us a gigaton or more per year of CO2.
But afforestation means setting aside land that we'd otherwise be using for farming or building strip malls or whatever
which some countries I know might have a hard time with.
So the IPCC also proposes planting bioenergy crops which not only collect CO2,
but can be burned as fuel.
Fast-growing plants like sugar cane and tropical grasses are good biofuels,
but we'd have to capture and store the carbon when we burn it.
And then, there's the nuclear option.
The report's authors point out that nuclear energy makes sense from a global warming perspective.
They also point out that there, you know, are all those risks,
including the safety of the power plants themselves
and being stuck with radioactive waste for tens of thousands of years.
The next 10 to 20 years are, really, our last opportunity to make big changes
before a depressing situation turns into a catastrophic one.
I don't know about you, but I'm kinda liking the Earth the way it is now
and even though humans are really screwing this up, I'd like to keep living, as well, so let's try to make this happen.
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