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If climate action becomes urgent: the importance of response times for various climate strategies

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Abstract

Most deliberations on climate policy are based on a mitigation response that assumes a gradually increasing reduction over time. However, situations may occur where a more urgent response is needed. A key question for climate policy in general, but even more in the case a rapid response is needed, is: what are the characteristic response times of the response options, such as rapid mitigation or solar radiation management (SRM)? This paper explores this issue, which has not received a lot of attention yet, by looking into the role of both societal and physical response times. For mitigation, technological and economic inertia clearly limit reduction rates with considerable uncertainty corresponding to political inertia and societies’ ability to organize rapid mitigation action at what costs. The paper looks into a rapid emission reductions of 4–6 % annually. Reduction rates at the top end of this range (up to 6 %) could effectively reduce climate change, but only with a noticeable delay. Temperatures could be above those in the year of policy introduction for more than 70 years, with unknown consequences of overshoot. A strategy based on SRM is shown to have much shorter response times (up to decades), but introduces an important element of risk, such as ocean acidification and the risk of extreme temperature shifts in case action is halted. Above all, the paper highlights the role of response times in designing effective policy strategies implying that a better understanding of these crucial factors is required.

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Notes

  1. Geo-engineering is a generic terms for all kinds of response options with very different characteristics. Two broad categories are carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and solar radiation management (SRM). In this paper we focus on the second type of measures. Therefore, in the remainder of the paper will specifically refer to solar radiation management (SRM) and avoid the term geo-engineering as far as possible.

  2. Note that we implemented the strategy rather rapidly for illustration purposes, if a sudden drop in temperature would be considered dangerous by itself, the strategy could also be implemented more smoothly

  3. We estimated the ocean acidification based on a simple off-line calculation calibrated to numbers found in the literature for 2100 atmospheric CO2 concentration and the pH of the upper ocean layer to derive the following relationship: pHocean = 10.498* CO2,atm -0.0443 (Adams and Caldeira (2008) Ocean storage of CO2. Elements 4:319–324, Caldeira and Wickett (2003) Oceanography: anthropogenic carbon and ocean pH. Nature 425:365, Orr et al. (2005) Anthropogenic ocean acidification over the 21st century and its impact on calcifying organisms. Ibid. 437:681–686.)

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Acknowledgments

The contribution of D.P. van Vuuren to this paper benefitted from the financial support provided by the EU FP7 project LIMITS.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, Bilthoven, The Netherlands

    Detlef P. van Vuuren & Elke Stehfest

  2. Department of Geosciences, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Detlef P. van Vuuren

  3. Netherlands Environmental Assesment Agency, PO Box 303, 3720, AH, Bilthoven, The Netherlands

    Detlef P. van Vuuren

Authors
  1. Detlef P. van Vuuren
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  2. Elke Stehfest
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Correspondence to Detlef P. van Vuuren.

Additional information

This article is part of a special issue on "Geoengineering Research and its Limitations" edited by Robert Wood, Stephen Gardiner, and Lauren Hartzell-Nichols.

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van Vuuren, D.P., Stehfest, E. If climate action becomes urgent: the importance of response times for various climate strategies. Climatic Change 121, 473–486 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-013-0769-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-013-0769-5

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