An effective graph summarizing the climate conundrum
Bill McKibben of 350.org created a graph summarizing the picture for carbon in a particularly effective way. It’s part of a Washington Post compilation of the most important graphs of 2012.
This graph summarizes the warming limit approach to the climate problem nicely (for more details, see my post about “Why fossil fuel abundance is a illusion”, Chapters 1 to 3 and Appendix A in Cold Cash, Cool Climate, and Bill McKibben’s Rolling Stone article titled “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math”). When you compare the amount of carbon we can emit and stay within the 2 Celsius degree warming limit to proved reserves of fossil fuels, it’s clear that we just can’t burn it all. This reality hasn’t yet sunk in, because the valuation of fossil fuel companies still implies that we can.
As an aside, readers who know my book Turning Numbers into Knowledge are aware that I’m not a fan of 3D bar charts, and the point could have been better made with a 2D bar overlaid on top of Google Earth. The message of the graph is the most important thing, however, and the image is striking, so I’ll give Bill a pass on this issue.
Addendum (December 28, 2012): The graph uses a term called “declared reserves”, which isn’t one that is used much in the literature, but it’s likely that it represents proved reserves plus some part of what geologists call “resources”. The latter category represents fossil fuel deposits that we expect to be there based on our current knowledge, but we don’t know their quantities as accurately as the proved reserves (which we are pretty sure we can extract at current prices using current technologies).
