EXTREME WEATHER: and what to do about it

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v0.9 color unabridged version.
While this book is about climate change from global warming, you will find it quite different from the usual treatment. The biggest threat is now extreme weather, not the next fractional degree of overheating. What to do about it is removal of the 50% excess of CO2 in the air, while continuing our efforts at emissions reduction to keep the problem from coming back. The CO2 removal must be done quickly because the extreme weather threat could collapse the global economy and keep us from acting effectively.

Considering how the extreme weather disruptions might play out, a reasonable threat appraisal is that we may only have twenty years to finish a CO2 cleanup. Even if the most ambitious of cleanup proposals were implemented on the fastest possible schedule, it would still be eight years before the cooling began.

Why? Because of the need to first offset our continuing emissions of +40 GtCO2/yr; there will be no cooling and thus no relief from extreme weather until that annual increase is countered by a -40 GtCO2/yr. Given the generation time of capital equipment and people’s habits, getting to zero will take many decades—decades that we no longer have. Yet some think we can wait until then to start removing CO2.

Threat assessment is the practice of determining the credibility and seriousness of a potential threat, as well as the probability that the threat will become a reality. For the next 15-20 years, until cooling substantially reduces our extreme weather, we will continue to be battered by extreme weather as we try to save the world from a global economic crash—one likely to start a major human population crash, complete with genocides and takeover wars.

Readers already familiar with the climate crisis will find some novel aspects in what follows: the extreme weather surge, a medical-school professor’s justification for what makes it an emergency, some design criteria for how to take the 50% excess of CO2 out of circulation, and the proposal for how to get started with a “Manhattan Project 2.0”.

This book promotes a paradigm shift away from focusing on the next fractional-degree rise in temperature to a new focus on the extreme weather surge .

Given the legislative gridlock in the U.S., we need a workaround to quickly get things moving. The CO2 Foundation is proposing a Governors’ Design Initiative to Repair Climate run as a nonprofit, where experts work together for a few years to design and prototype for a bigger project that takes the excess CO2 out of circulation. They would finish with prototypes and field trials in only four years, as did the Manhattan Project between 1941 and 1945.

For speed, the Design Initiative would utilize a finance committee of a dozen tech billionaires, who already appreciate what speed requires. The governors would oversee the project, representing the public interest.
Government involvement would need to kick in by the end of the four-year design project to do the mass deployment. In the meantime, progress on the Design Initiative should serve as a prod to lawmakers.

A lot could happen in the meantime, but our situation is not hopeless, as those exaggerated reader-grabbing headlines are starting to suggest. Doing something big should bring hope during the minimum 10-15 years it will take to begin reducing extreme weather.

Our situation may be bad, but it is not too late. There are effective actions we can still take to repel the extreme weather invasion, if we only get our act together in a hurry.