These are trying times, but here on Treehugger, we always look on the bright side of life. The glass is half full or, in this case, the sink. And it appears that the carbon sinks—the natural phenomena where the oceans, trees, and other natural absorbers of atmospheric carbon—could do a quick job of cooling the climate if we stop adding carbon dioxide (CO2).
At a seminar hosted by Covering Climate Now (CCNow), an organization supporting climate journalism, CCNow co-founder and executive director Mark Hertsgaard summarized the situation. Hertsgaard said, according to the transcript:
The carbon cycle is well known, and so was the fact that humans were cranking out the CO2 faster than the trees and the ocean could absorb them. But we have been saying for years that the temperature will keep rising, even if we stop adding CO2 to the atmosphere right now. We have also been talking about carbon budgets being directly related to the degrees of warming. But climate scientist Michael Mann suggests that this may have been simplistic.
Mann explains we have been misunderstanding the science around carbon budgets, where we have suggested that the surface temperature we end up with is a function of cumulative carbon emissions. But it is not so simple, due to “the fact that carbon dioxide levels actually start coming down once you stop emitting carbon into the atmosphere. And that’s because natural sinks, particularly the ocean, continue to take carbon out of the atmosphere.” He uses the kitchen sink analogy:
Hertsgaard also looked on the bright side of life but notes this is not a Get Out of Jail Free card. He noted: “There’s a lot of work to do. But if we lower the emissions quickly, we can get there. We can avoid the worst.”
This being a discussion on a climate journalism website, there was a lot of talk about how we can use this information to change the way we talk about climate change. As Scientific American editor-in-chief Laura Helmuth noted, “The challenge of our careers is to not be unremittingly grim, to be honest and completely clear about what’s happening, but not make it seem hopeless or reveal in which ways it’s not hopeless.”
Hertsgaard, Mann, and International Centre for Climate Change and Development Director Saleemul Huq turned all of this into an article for The Washington Post where they reiterate this information is not new but was “inadvertently buried” in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports. But now that it has been dug up, it should be put to good use.
This is not news, and it is not a game-changer—it’s really spin, a positive presentation of the data because as Hertsgaard noted in the webinar: “The social science research shows that people are very tired. Average people when they look at the news, it’s all bad news. If it bleeds, it leads. I’m tired of that. So they tune us out.” I certainly see that Treehugger readers are tired.
So I am not going to complain about a little positive spin that reinforces our Treehugger position: The climate crisis is fixable. We remain upbeat and positive, and we will take all the good news we can get.
