In a Scientific American article about President Obama's Clean Power Plan, David Biello quotes Obama:
The plan relies on three basic options to lock in and drive future reductions: improving the efficiency with which power plants burn coal; swapping natural gas for coal; or replacing electricity generated from burning fossil fuels with electricity generated from renewable resources, such as the wind, water, sun and geothermal heat. Such shifts lead the EPA to project the full 32 percent reduction in CO2 emissions from 2005 levels by 2030. "The nerdier way to say that is that we'll be keeping 870 million tons of carbon dioxide pollution out of our atmosphere," Obama said.(Emphasis mine.)
|The carbon-climate response|
This graph to the right, from the IPCC, shows how well the CCR function captures reality, and projects it into the future.
870 Mt CO2 is 237 Mt carbon, or 0.00024 trillion tons of carbon.
So the warming prevented will be 0.0004°C, or 0.4 milli°C. That's
The 5-95 percentile limits are (rounding) 0.0002°C to 0.0005°C.
That's just depressing. This significant proposed change in US policy, which seems a stretch but probably doable, though it may not survive years of court challenges, will barely nudge down the warming we are to expect.
And yet, the emissions cuts have to be done.
And more cuts must follow this.
The conclusion is, global warming has to be solved one milli-Celsius at a time. Many will complain that the number is too tiny and the plan isn't worth doing. But, of course, those same people would never acccept a plan that DID reduce warming 0.1°C at a time.
The US can't solve this problem alone, of course, We're a nation of 321 million people, putting forth a plan to prevent 870 million tons of CO2. If the entire world did the same, population 7.26 billion, the warming prevented would be 0.01°C.
Of course, much of the world can't cut that much. Some of the world's people don't even emit that much in total.
So if the entire OECD did the same, population 1.26 billion in 2013, prevented warming would be (rounding) 0.001°C.
Anthropogenic climate change looks very much like an insurmountable problem. At least tonight.