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The global carbon budget tells us how much more carbon we can emit or ‘spend’ before we risk temperatures passing 1.5°C. On the current trajectory, we have about 316 Gigatonnes left before we run out around May 2029. This is why there is such an urgent push to reduce emissions by 2030.

But this budget is based on emissions from fossil fuels and agriculture. It doesn’t include emissions from ferocious forest fires, or even more concerning, melting permafrost (Fig. 1).

“Permafrost emissions are really hard to capture in global models, so even in the [new climate models] being used to project climate in the future and the behaviour of the planet and the global climate system, these emissions are not included…climate modellers don’t want to include it; permafrost modellers really think they should.” – Video (top) State of the Cryosphere Report, COP26

Fig. 1: Estimated permafrost changes 2003-2017. Images: International Cryosphere Climate Initiative at COP26. See the video at the top of this page for the full presentation.
Presently, emissions from permafrost are about the same as Japan’s; around 1.15 Gigatonnes. Not accounting for these emissions is like knowing that someone is withdrawing money from your bank account, but ignoring it. As temperatures continue to rise, more permafrost melts, so there’s even less available to ‘spend’. To compound the problem, the Arctic is warming as much as four times faster than the rest of the planet.
 
The global carbon budget does include a savings plan to draw down the excess from the atmosphere through ‘negative emissions’ technology and planting trees. But this dubious plan doesn’t include drawing down all these additional emissions from permafrost, placing an even greater burden on many future generations:

“Suppose we do reach net zero emissions by 2050, permafrost is going to continue emitting for at least a couple of centuries. So, in addition to the negative emissions that are in the models to keep temperature below 1.5°C, we also have to have negative emissions to offset permafrost. And we’re going to have to continue doing that for a couple of hundred years until the permafrost stabilises,” – Op cit.

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The science is unequivocal. The 12-minute video above succinctly outlines this complex issue. The figures at the bottom of this page are eye-watering…and that’s just from processing meat and dairy.

“From production to transportation packaging use and waste management, based on the most detailed meta analysis of life cycle assessments to date, on average it takes 71kg of CO2 to produce 1kg of beef. For lamb, it’s about 40kg; pigs 12kg; and poultry 10kg.

“Some 26% of greenhouse gasses comes from agriculture. By far the largest share is methane and nitrous oxide from cattle. Methane alone has already caused caused around 24-40% of human-made warming.

“The destruction of forests for farmland not only releases the CO2 that was bound in the flora, it sets free carbon that was stored in the soil and destroys its ability to store it in the future. This aspect accounts for much of the range of emissions in beef.”

This loss continues in Aotearoa (13,000 hectares lost in the past 5 years alone). Then there’s the nitrogen and phosphates added to farms that ends up in waterways, which results in, amongst other things, algae blooms that emit methane when they die:

“Between 1991 and 2019, estimates from sales data of nitrogen applied to land in fertiliser increased from 62,000 to 452,000 tonnes (just over a sixfold increase, 629 percent).

“Since our last update of this indicator in April 2019, there was a 5.4 percent increase from 2015 to 2019 in nitrogen applied from fertiliser. In this period, urease inhibitor use increased 48 percent.” – Statistics NZ

And then there’s the palm oil imported to feed our ‘grass fed’ cows:

“A new Greenpeace International report has found evidence of systematic violations by the Indonesian Government regarding plantation and forest release permits in the Papua region. The report also finds that clearing forest for palm plantations in the Papua area could release huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, undoing previous climate action. 

“New Zealand is the world’s biggest importer of palm kernel expeller–a product of the palm industry used as supplementary feed for New Zealand’s 6.5 million dairy cows. 

“In 2018, a Greenpeace investigation found that Fonterra’s key supplier of PKE, Wilmar International, has been linked with the mass destruction of rainforest in Papua, Indonesia. In 2020, Fonterra handed over its half of PKE-importing business Agrifeeds to business partnerWilmar International. 

“Greenpeace Aotearoa campaigner Amanda Larsson says the dairy industry’s continued use of PKE is one of myriad ways that intensive dairying is fuelling the climate crisis. 

“Right now, dairying is New Zealand’s biggest climate polluter. We’ve got methane from 6.5 million cows, nitrous oxide from cows and synthetic nitrogen fertiliser, and carbon from the coal used to process milk,” says Larsson.” – Greenpeace April, 2021

Finally, there’s the carbon cost of processing all that meat and dairy. Remember, this is in addtion to the methane, nitrous oxide and CO2 emissions from growing this meat on farms. Fonterra is the worst carbon polluter in the country, emitting a staggering 16.3 million tonnes of eCO2 in 2020 alone. Silver Fern farms emitted 8.3 million tonnes (Table 9 below: from the New Zealand Government EPA report ‘ETS Participant Emissions‘, October 2021, pages 27-30).

So yes, meat and dairy really is that bad for the climate.

Greenhouse gas emissions from Fonterra and other dairy and meat processors New Zealand

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COP26 logo

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The carbon budget: a moving target that politicians just moved beyond reach.

Fig. 1. This live feed from the Mercator Institute is, by default, set to show how much time we have left before the CO2 budget to stay under 2°C is no longer possible. The CO2 budget is in tonnes. Currently (18 March 2022), it’s 1,060Gt (Gt = 1 billion tonnes). At the present rate of emissions, this will run out around April 2047.
 
However, if we want the planet to remain habitable for most (but not all) people, and accept losing entire ecosystems like the Great Barrier Reef, we need to keep the average temperature rise under 1.5°C.

Click the box on the top right ‘1.5°C scenario‘ to see that a 66% chance of succeeding means that (as of 18 March 2022), we can emit no more that 309Gt. At the current rate of emissions, that’s July 2029.

Bankrupting the Carbon Budget:

What tipping points mean for the carbon budget

In Bankrupting the Carbon Budget: Part I, tipping points were explained in Videos 1 and 2.

Others tipping points include wildfires in the Arctic and Australia. Together these released around 1Gt of CO2 in 2020. The devastation was so great in places that the conditions that led to the evolution of these ancient ecosystems no longer exist. ‘Zombie’ wildfires in boreal forests in Siberia and Canada and Alaska continue to burn peat underground over winter, re-igniting record-breaking forest fires in the summer of 2021.

These forests, which make up large parts of the biosphere that once absorbed carbon and locked it away, are now releasing carbon to the atmosphere together with human-caused emissions. They have passed a tipping point; a point of no return. The countdown clock in Fig. 1 doesn’t include these emissions because the compound effects are so complex, they have yet to be included in Earth systems models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

But the atmosphere doesn’t care where these emissions originate. Nor how much nations—most notably New Zealand—or businesses cheat on their carbon accounting. The reality is that the carbon budget is a globally shared account. Governments think they know how much we have left to ‘spend’, but the burning forests and melting permafrost and methane clathrates are making CO2 withdrawals over which we have no control. All we know is that somewhere between warming of 1-2°C, some tipping points will be irreversible and warming will accelerate, causing even more tipping points to fall like dominoes.

A race against time

Currently, atmospheric CO2 is around 418ppm and climbing 2-3ppm every year. Global average temperatures are 1.2°C and rising. The last time CO2 in the atmosphere exceeded 400ppm was during the Pliocene Epoch (2.6-5.3 million years ago). Global average temperatures were 2-3°C warmer, Antarctica was 14°C warmer, and melting ice caps added 10-20 metres to sea levels.
 
So why aren’t we already that hot?


The relationship between the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and warming is well-understood physics and chemistry. But there is a delay—a lag time of 10-20 years—between adding CO2 to the atmosphere and warming. So even if we switch off all emissions today, things will get hotter over the next two decades. It takes even longer for melting icecaps to raise sea levels, unless there’s an abrupt Meltwater Event (historically, these have raised sea levels as much as 4m/century).

The IPCC is banking our future existence on the lag time to literally buy us time to drawdown enough CO2 from the atmosphere and permanently store it back where it came from, with fingers crossed that will return the planet to a safe operating space of 350ppm. 

The Plan: built-in assumptions

The crucial thing about The Plan is that it depends entirely on assumptions. The most important assumption is that carbon capture technologies will draw down and safely store CO2 underground before warming triggers irreversible tipping points. This assumption (otherwise known as magical thinking) is because there isn’t enough land on Earth to plant enough trees to offset emissions while still being able to grow food to feed an exploding global population:

“If we absolutely maximised the amount of vegetation all land on Earth could hold, we’d sequester enough carbon to offset about ten years of greenhouse gas emissions at current rates. After that, there could be no further increase in carbon capture.
 
“Together, land plants and soils hold about 2,500Gt of carbon – about three times more than is held in the atmosphere.
 
“In recognition of these fundamental constraints, scientists estimate that the Earth’s land ecosystems can hold enough additional vegetation to absorb between 40 and 100Gt of carbon from the atmosphere. Once this additional growth is achieved (a process which will take a number of decades), there is no capacity for additional carbon storage on land.”

– Bonnie Waring, Senior Lecturer, Grantham Institute, Climate Change and Environment, Imperial College London

In spite of this limitation, deploying natural climate solutions (NCS) to draw down carbon into restored natural ecosystems would help restore critical, life-supporting ecosystem services.
 
Because we literally cannot live without these services, including their role in climate adaptation and mitigation, every government and council should be treating natural ecosytems as critical natural infrastructure. This is a higher-order priority than critical built infrastructure. Built infrastructure cannot exist without natural infrastructure, whereas natural infrastructure does not need built infrastructure.
 
So, what does The Plan look like?

The Plan by the numbers: 2019 – 2050

  • Atmospheric concentration at the start of 2019: 408ppm
  • Emit: no more than 400Gt of CO2 over the next 21 years; this would add around 23ppm to the atmosphere.
  • Offset emissions: as some emissions are unavoidable, they must be 100% offset by drawing down the same amount of CO2 as emitted and storing it permanently underground or in natural ecosystems. Plantation forestry is by definition not permanent, so it shouldn’t be regarded as a permanent offset because the carbon in it is recycled back into the atmosphere.
  • Draw down: an average 3.9Gt of CO2 every year (total 81.9Gt between 2019-2050) and store it underground and in natural ecosystems. In total, this would remove around 10.5ppm. Again, plantation forestry shouldn’t be regarded as a permanent drawdown.
  • Together, The Plan means that atmospheric concentration as of January 2050  will be: 408ppm + 23ppm – 10.5pm = 420.5ppm.
  • Limitations to offsetting and drawdown:
    • The world’s terrestrial ecosystems can only hold between 40 and 100Gt, so by 2050, CO2 will need to be permanently stored elsewhere.
    • Burning forests and melting permafrost and methane clathrates are emitting CO2 and methane. We don’t know how much, we have no control over it, but we do know this is eating into the existing carbon budget.

The Plan by the numbers: 2050 – 2100

  • The planned atmospheric concentration at the start of 2050: 420.5ppm
  • Emit: zero CO2
  • Offset: As some emissions are unavoidable, they must be 100% offset by drawing down the same amount of CO2 as emitted and storing it permanently underground. By now, terrestrial ecosystems will be unable to store any more carbon.
  • Draw down average 24Gt/year until 2100 (24Gt x 50 years = 1,250Gt or 72ppm) and store it…somewhere.
  • Planned atmospheric concentration at the start of 2100: 420.5ppm – 72ppm  = 348.5ppm.
  • Limitations to offsetting and draw down:

The Plan: how are we doing so far? 2019 – 2021

  • Atmospheric concentration at the start of 2019: 408ppm
  • Atmospheric concentration at start of 2022: 418ppm, ie, we’re going to hit  420.5pm before 2024, not 2050.
  • Emitted: 107Gt of CO2 (26.7% of the 21-year budget ‘spent’ in 3 years)
  • Offset: A handful of the world’s largest carbon polluters are buying up most of the land available for afforestation/reforestation to offset their emissions, leaving no available land for others to offset theirs. This includes land needed to feed people. Many are investing in low value or ‘ghost’ forests such as palm oil plantations, because plants that grow faster earn far more money from carbon credits. Many corporations have no plans to ever become carbon neutral because they will pass the cost of cheap and often useless offsets onto customers. The New Zealand Government, which is using taxpayer dollars to subside the eye-watering carbon cost of agriculture (giving them a 95% discount on emissions), and Fonterra, our largest carbon polluter, also plan to buy carbon credits offshore because they’re cheaper.
“New Zealand’s proposals to COP-26 were dismaying, seeking to shift the task of seriously tackling climate change to others. Spending five billion dollars on international credits to ‘restore’ forests overseas when our own forests are dying is like investing in someone else’s business when your own is going bankrupt. It’s irresponsible.”
 
– Dame Anne Salmond, Distinguished Professor in anthropology at the University of Auckland, and 2013 New Zealander of the Year.

  • Draw down: In spite of all the reforestation and rewilding projects around the globe, terrestrial ecosystem destruction (land use change) exceeded reforestation and offsetting by approximately 10Gt (Fig. 2). A large chunk of these losses are from the Amazon, parts of which have become so dry that they can no longer support re-forestation, so they’re turning in savannahs or being used to grow palm oil, soya, and methane-emitting cows.
  • Limitations to offsetting and drawdown:
    • Oddities with emissions trading schemes not accounting for the value of carbon locked in established forests and their soils, has created perverse incentives: old-growth and naturally regenerating forests are being cut down and/or burned so they can be replaced by fast growing monoculture crops like pine forests that earn more from carbon credits (if they survive wildfires and rapidly rising temperatures). And COP26 did nothing to prevent this from happening into the future (scroll down).
    • The only company extracting CO2 and permanently storing it underground (versus selling it as fuel) is in Iceland. In September 2021, Climeworks’ operations scaled up. It now draws down and stores 4,000 tonnes CO2/year. To scale up to 3.9Gt/year (‘The Plan’) would require building and deploying 9.5 million additional fully operating plants of the same size. To scale up to 24Gt/year from 2050 onward would require 58.5 million additional fully operational plants of the same size. And then there’s this:

“No artificial machines that are even in the design stage will also clean our air, clean our water, provide habitat for wildlife and all the other useful features of trees.” – Sophie Bertazzo, Senior editor, Conservation International

Fig. 2. Sources of carbon emissions 2021 (Image: www.co2.earth/global-co2-emissions)
Fig. 2. Sources of carbon emissions 2021 (Image: www.co2.earth/global-co2-emissions)

COP26: bankrupting the carbon budget

“We are on the verge of the abyss, and when you are on the verge of the abyss, you need to be very careful about what the next step is.  And the next step is COP26 in Glasgow.”

– Antonio Guterres Secretary General for the United Nations
 
Video 1: “I apologise for the way this process has unfolded. I am deeply sorry. I also understand the deep disappointment but I also think, as you have noted, that it is vital that we protect this package.”

– Alok Sharma, President COP26 following last minute changes from India and China.
 
Sharma apologised because India and China hijacked the meeting in the last minutes, demanding that the wording of the final agreement be that coal would be ‘phased down’ not ‘phased out’. China, the world’s largest emitter, won’t commit to net zero until 2060. India, whose emission are increasing fast every year, won’t commit to net zero until 2070. 
 
As Sharma pointed out, the final package, as weak as it was, brings agreement to the rules in Paris Agreement. And, while it’s taken 165 years, fossil fuels have now been formally recognised as the primary driver of climate change.
 
The ‘Reducing Deforestation’ COP26 Article
 
This looks like a win…except that the same declaration was also made 17 years ago, after which deforestation subsequently increased:
“The Glasgow declaration on forests and land use is a pledge to end or significantly reduce deforestation by 2030… In 2014 the New York declaration on forests promised to cut deforestation by 50% by 2020 and end it completely by 2030. Since then there’s been an increase in global deforestation contributing an estimated 23% to total global CO2 emissions.

“Under the UN rules, man-made plantations count as forests even though they contain none of the rich ecosystems and biodiversity of indigenous forests. Environmental groups worry that a big chunk of the $19.2 billion dollars allocated to the Glasgow declaration will be used to tear down existing forestry land to create more of these plantations for things like palm oil, paper and wood pellets, instead of preserving and protecting the trees and plants and wildlife that are now so critically endangered. 

“And how about this doozy: the declaration’s terminology of deforestation refers to ‘permanent loss of forests when land is fully converted to some other use like agriculture or development’. It’s almost completely silent on the role of traditional logging in driving forest degradation from within. Under this agreement loggers can still disappear deep inside a rainforest like the Amazon and destroy forest biodiversity and carbon stocks resulting in almost exactly the same devastating impacts as true deforestation.”

– David Borlace, Video 2 (below)
 
Between 2012 and 2018, New Zealand indigenous land cover area decreased by 12,869ha. In 2020 alone we lost 8,530ha of native forest. There is no reason to expect that trend or enforcement of current or future policies to reverse that trend.
 
So where does that leave us?
 
Carbon Brief has done a full analysis of the outcomes. If every country actually delivers on their promises and statements made at COP26, warming will be around 2.4°C. But that was before India and China insisted in last minute changes. China, India, Australia, and Russia announced plans to open more coal mines. And oil production from OPEC increased.
Climate Action Tracker breaks down the numbers (Fig. 3).
 
The most commonly repeated mantra that you’ll hear on the news, is that to stay within 1.5°C target, global emissions need to fall 45% by 2030. But that’s based on The Plan. The countdown clock at the top of the page, which reflects what’s actually happening in the atmosphere, is clear: to have a 66% chance of staying under 1.5°C emissions need to fall to zero by 2027. As we have no control over the growing emissions from wildfires, melting permafrost and methane clathrates, we had also better start drawing down and permanently storing CO2 as fast as possible.

Fig. 3. The most optimistic scenario of 1.8C (pale blue box) requires every single country to meet every single promise and every single target by 2030. This does not include tipping points (Image and linked PDF report: Climate Action Tracker. )
Fig. 3. The most optimistic scenario of 1.8C (pale blue box) requires every single country to meet every single promise and every single target by 2030. This does not include tipping points (Image and linked PDF report: Climate Action Tracker. )

COP26: The oceans

As Bonnie Waring said in the quote above:

“If we absolutely maximised the amount of vegetation all land on Earth could hold…”

The oddity in The Plan is that it largely ignores 70% of the surface of the planet that’s not land: the oceans, or more specifically the blue carbon in them. For the first time, the capability of the oceans to rapidly draw down and permanently store vast quantities of CO2 was finally addressed at COP26.

New Zealand has an exclusive oceanic economic zone 14 times larger than our land area. Why isn’t the government (and heavy carbon polluters) using that incredible capacity to invest far more in locally produced blue carbon? Fed by the sun, with no need for irrigation or agricultural chemicals, some species can grow up to 1m/day, drawing down as much as five times more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than rainforests, and permanently sequestering if not harvested and instead, cut and dropped into deep ocean.

Watch this (deep blue) space.

Video 2 : Comprensive 18-minute analysis of COP26
 

More information

  • COP26: The final draft
  • Glasgow’s 2030 credibility gap: net zero’s lip service to climate action: Climate Action Tracker
  • Detailed analyses of each component of COP26: Carbon Brief (scroll down the page a bit to see the links to each section)
hottest days

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We need carbon. We need water, too. But like all good things, there can be too much. Too little water and we die of thirst. Too much, we drown. The same with carbon. Too little in the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide (CO2), we go into an Ice Age. Too much, the planet broils. We know this because of the geological evidence and from fundamental laws of physics and chemistry.

How much carbon is there?

There is about 1.85 billion, billion tonnes of carbon on Earth. More than 99% is beneath our feet in soil and rocks including fossil fuels and permafrost. Just 0.2% or 43,500Gt is above the surface. Through natural processes, carbon is constantly in flux. That is, it’s moving between the land, the oceans, and living things (see ‘carbon cycle’ this website). When it’s burned, melted, or respired, it becomes a gas, combining with oxygen to make CO2. Some ends up in the atmosphere*. The rest is absorbed by terrestrial and oceanic ecosystems: forests, grasslands, wetlands, and marine animals and plants that make more than half the oxygen we breathe, and also as carbonic acid (H2CO3) dissolved in ocean and lake waters.

*Calculations at the bottom of this page.


A shift in time

It doesn’t take much CO2 in the atmosphere to warm the planet. Some 18,000 years ago, the concentration of CO2 was 189 ppm (parts per million). Global temperatures were 7-9°C cooler than today, and ice sheets several kilometres thick covered most of Europe and North America.

Over the next 10,000 years, the concentration increased 72ppm, to reach 261ppm. That was enough to warm the planet 6-8°C (Fig 2.).

Fig. 2: The blue line shows globally averaged surface air temperature from 24,000 years ago to the present day, compiled from paleoclimate records with a computer model of the climate system. The horizontal scale has been stretched for the past 1,000 years to show recent changes. Warming begins at the end of the last Glacial around 18,000 years ago, then temperatures stabilize around 9,000 years ago until the last 170 years, when excessive greenhouse gasses triggered rapid warming. (Image: Osman et al /Nature).
Fig. 2: The blue line shows globally averaged surface air temperature from 24,000 years ago to the present day, compiled from paleoclimate records with a computer model of the climate system. The horizontal scale has been stretched for the past 1,000 years to show recent changes. Warming begins at the end of the last Glacial around 18,000 years ago, then temperatures stabilize around 9,000 years ago until the last 170 years, when excessive greenhouse gasses triggered rapid warming. (Image: Osman et al /Nature).
 
By then, some 8,000 year ago, the warming had created a comfortable, and crucially a stable and predictable enough climate to enable humans to plant crops, domesticate livestock, and build civilizations. This land-use change added about 400Gt of CO2 to reach a concentration of 284ppm by the year 1850.
 
Courtesy of our planet’s eccentric orbit around the sun, the Earth was also entering a gradual cooling cycle that would ultimately lead to another Glacial epoch. This orbital obliquity largely compensated for the gradual warming effect of the extra carbon in the atmosphere. Aside from a few small climatic blips caused by volcanoes and the sun’s activity, the global climate remained stable enough for human civilization to reach a technological watershed moment: the Industrial Revolution.
 
To power this revolution, we dug carbon out of the ground and burned it to fuel ever-larger machines, fishing fleets, and massive land use changes to feed ever more people, destroying vast natural ecosystems that once locked away millions of tonnes of carbon. Their burned remains entered the atmosphere as CO2. (Slaughtering countless whales may have added quite a bit, too). In the 100 years from 1850 to 1950 we added, either directly or indirectly, another 450Gt of CO2 to the atmosphere, and so concentrations reached 310ppm.
 
It was about to get worse. Between 1950 and 2000—just 50 years—we added around 1050Gt; more than twice as much as we’d added the previous 7,950 years. Atmospheric CO2 passed 370ppm. Shoveling so much carbon into the atmosphere had postponed the inception of the next Glacial epoch by 100,000 years.
 
The terrestrial and ocean ecosystems that once supported us continued to being burned and bulldozed. And the pace of destruction kept increasing. The ocean, which had been absorbing more than 90% of the extra heat and as much as half the excess CO2, was becoming dangerously acidic. 
 
Twenty-one years later, on 21 April 2021, atmospheric CO2 passed 420ppm* for the first time in several million years. Our planet is now heating up faster than at any time since the comet wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. And the oceans are now absorbing only about 25% of it.
 

*The average for 2021 will be about 417ppm because atmospheric concentrations change between summer (lower) and winter (higher); see the graph below for an explanation.

The carbon budget

When governments signed the 2015 Paris Agreement they did so promising to keep global warming under 1.5°C by staying within a carbon budget. Each nation could choose how they would achieve this by reducing emissions—carbon ‘spending’—and increasing carbon ‘savings’ by planting carbon-absorbing trees. Obviously, to stay within the global budget, every nation had to play its part.

They didn’t. Emissions increased (Fig. 3)

Fig. 3: Emissions 2015-2021 * (projected (Image: co2.earth).
Fig. 3: Emissions 2015-2021 * (projected (Image: co2.earth).
In 2021, the IPCC presented a stark warning. Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, we’ve added about 2,400Gt of CO2 the atmosphere, around a third of which we added in just the past 20 years. To have a 66% of staying within 1.5°C, starting from January 2020, the world could emit no more than 400Gt of CO2. 
 
Emissions in 2020 were 38Gt. Emissions in 2021 are projected to be around 39Gt (Fig. 3). That leaves around 323Gt in the budget if we’re prepared to live with a 66% chance of keeping temperatures under 1.5°C. Or we can spend another 421Gt to have a 50% chance.
 

And only if one-way climate tipping points, don’t tip.

 

Tipping points are tipping

Scientists had been saying for decades that warming between 1 to 2°C would trigger catastrophic tipping points. At 1.2°C our climate is now already too hot to refreeze the 10,000 cubic metres of ice melting every second from Greenland’s ice sheet. So much freshwater entering the North Atlantic is already changing oceanic currents. This is triggering more tipping points in a cascade effect that will lead to irreversible chain reactions and rapid warming well beyond 3°C. Unless COP26 brings radical and immediate changes, the planet is destined to enter an entirely new ‘hothouse’ state, one we cannot control or reverse. And one hostile to our existence.
 

“The drama here is that one characteristic of tipping points is that once you press the ‘on’ button you cannot stop it; it takes over. It’s too late. It’s not like you could say, ‘Oops, now I realize I didn’t want to melt the Greenland ice cap. Let’s back off.’ Then it’s too late.” – Johan Rockström, Breaking Boundaries: The Science of Our Planet (Video 1)

Other tipping points are also pushing the carbon budget to the edge of a potential freefall. This includes vast areas of permafrost—frozen soil that contains an estimated 1,600Gt of carbon, almost twice the amount in the atmosphere today—is melting, disgorging CO2 and the far more potent greenhouse gas, methane into the atmosphere. And the Amazon rainforest, which could potentially releasing 200Gt of carbon into the atmosphere over the next 30 years. That is, by 2050. This process has already begun in south-east Amazonia (Video 2).
 
Earlier this year, the World Meteorological Organization stated that at least one of the next 5 years will be 1.5°C* warmer than pre-Industrial levels. And the chance of this happening is increasing with time.
 
Would you send your kids to school knowing they had just a 66% chance of coming home alive? Or 50% if we emit an extra 21Gt over the budget? And every day, the odds of their survival are getting increasingly worse because emissions are increasing. That’s what the carbon budget means for their futures.
 
Kids have done those simple calculations. And that’s why they’re so angry.
 
*The internal variability in any single year is estimated to be ± 0.25°C, so a single year at 1.5°C could be compensated if the following years are much cooler.
 
Video 1: in ‘Breaking Boundaries: The Science of Our Planet’, Sir David Attenborough succinctly explains tipping points. This is a short version of the full documentary of the same name, available on Netflix. 
Video 2: Amazon carbon tipping point

More information

Carbon budget gross emission by sector New Zealand

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In 2019, Aotearoa’s net greenhouse gas emissions were 54.9 mt (megatonnes) of CO2-e (that means all greenhouse gases added together).

The single biggest emitter was agriculture: 48% or 39.6 mt (Figure ES 4.2).

The term LULUCF is used in the national greenhouse gas inventory that covers the combined emissions from land use, land-use change, and forestry due to human activities. Currently, the NZ guide (click on the image to download) has assessed this sector as a 'net sink', i.e, primarily because of forestry drawing down more carbon that the total LULUCF sector emits, the emissions are regarded as negative emissions (-33%) (see the full breakdown of the LULUCF at the bottom of this post). The calculations do not include the other impacts on land use change where it involves agriculture. The term IPPU refers to industrial processes and product use.
The term LULUCF is used in the national greenhouse gas inventory that covers the combined emissions from land use, land-use change, and forestry due to human activities. Currently, the NZ guide (click on the image to download) has assessed this sector as a ‘net sink’, i.e, primarily because of forestry drawing down more carbon that the total LULUCF sector emits, the emissions are regarded as negative emissions (-33%) (see the full breakdown of the LULUCF at the bottom of this post). The calculations do not include the other impacts on land use change where it involves agriculture. The term IPPU refers to industrial processes and product use.

From a climate warming perspective, all of that 54.9 mt of carbon was added to the excessive carbon debt—the highest in several million years—already in the atmosphere. But economists and policymakers are writing off this carbon debt because the goal is not to stop feeding the climate beast with more greenhouse gases. Nope. The goal is to keep adding more so that we can meet our obligations under the 2015 Paris Agreement to keep global temperatures under 1.5°C.

Yes, I know it’s irrational to be fixated on a 9-year old agreement that only one tiny country, Gambia, is anywhere close to meeting, using a budget to 2035 that’s going to be broken before then, given that the World Meteorological Organisation estimates we could reach 1.5°C sometime in 2026 [update 2024: we reached that in 2023]. But since irrational economics is driving our plan, let’s use their figures, and with a bit of simple arithmetic, calculate what our agricultural emissions will cost as we head into 2026, the first year that the agricultural sector in Aotearoa has to start paying for any of its emissions.

You may need a primer in the ETS (Emissions Trading Scheme) for this next bit to make sense, but simply put, it’s a polluter-pays scheme that places a $ value on CO2-e. Each 1-tonne of CO2-e is called a New Zealand Unit or NZU. They’re tradable commodities, so the rules of supply and demand mean prices fluctuate. In March 2021, one NZU cost $36. By September, it was $65, because by then, a lot of people had already done the calculations set out below, and realised how valuable these NZUs are going to become.

But let’s be really conservative and say an NZU is going to stay at $65.00 for the next three years. All we need to do is multiply $65 by the net amount of e-carbon emitted during that period. We’ll base the emissions on the Climate Commission proposed emissions budgets (Fig. 5.2 below). Again, these budgets are likely optimistic, but let’s be optimistic.

Years 2022-2025 net emissions = 208.5 mt total. As a megaton (mt) = 1,000,000 tonnes, that’s  2,085,000,000 tonnes x $65 = total $135,525,000,000 over three years.

Remember, the agricultural sector is exempt until 2026, so they don’t have to pay a cent of this.

Year 2026: By now, because they’ve had no incentives to change, the agricultural sector is assumed to be contributing 58% of all greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. The price of an NZU is expected to increase to $73.60. It’s probably going to be waaay higher, but let’s stick with that very conservative price estimate, to work out how much the agricultural sector should pay, using the emissions budget in Fig. 5.2 below, of 59.7 gt net emissions. That’s x 58% x 59,700,000 x $73.60 = $2,548,473,600.

If the number of zeros is confounding, that’s $2.55 billion worth of emissions. In one year. Just from agriculture.

But under New Zealand’s ETS, in 2026, agriculture is given a 95% discount. So they’re up for just $127,423,680 ($127.5 million). In fact, the agricultural sector is barely expected to reduce emissions by 11% by 2050 (see the graph at the top of this page).

Yes, I also know that the $ value under the ETS is not designed to put an actual value on emissions. It’s just an economic mechanism to incentivise industries to reduce emissions so that we can meet an outdated target to keep us under 1.5°C. But it’s the only mechanism we have. In the real world, all those greenhouse gases will be going into the atmosphere, feeding the climate beast, generating record-breaking floods and droughts that will bring serious costs to agriculture, because plans and policies based on economics can’t trump the laws of physics and chemistry and nature doesn’t do bailouts.

Maybe now is a good time to invest in food that’s grown like beer.

Emission budget 2019-2035 New Zealand
Table showing Greenhouse gas sequestration for native versus plantation forests
Fonterra investing in cellular agriclture versus dairy farming

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Back in 2019, Fonterra invested in US-based Motif FoodWorks. (See the Newsroom article: Fonterra dips hoof in alternative animal products by Eloise Gibson).
 
Motif FoodWorks makes milk using cultured proteins, that is, via a lab, not via dairy cows. And this is where the future of dairy—and meat—gets interesting. While Fonterra won’t disclose how much they invested, and are reluctant to talk about why they’re investing in a product that could potentially put dairy farmers out of business, the alternative proteins industry is becoming a serious competitor. And not just for dairy:
 

The whole of the cow milk industry, for example, will begin to collapse once PF [precision fermentation] technologies replace the proteins in a bottle of milk–just 3.3% of its content. Product after product that we extract from animals will be replaced by superior, cheaper, cleaner, and tastier alternatives, triggering a death spiral of increasing prices, decreasing demand, and reversing economies of scale for the livestock and seafood industries.             – RethinkX

One of the key recommendations from IPCC to rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, is to change our diets, particularly away from animal protein, primarily meat and dairy. This because growing animal protein produces a staggering volume of greenhouse gasses—48% of New Zealand’s emissions come from this sector.

Greenhouse gasses by sector. LULUFC is the acronym for Land Use, Land-Use Change and Forestry. (Image: Ministry for the Environment)
Greenhouse gasses by sector. LULUFC is the acronym for Land Use, Land-Use Change and Forestry. (Image: Ministry for the Environment)

Not everyone is prepared to give up meat and dairy of course, something of which the food industry is well aware. This has led to a rapid growth (no pun intended) in the cellular versus animal agriculture industry. Motif is one of dozens of these fast-growing disruptive technologies that aim to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions and enable intensively farmed land to be returned to natural ecosystems, which also means cleaner waterways. At its simplest level, this is how it works:

The differences in resources used to grow meat versus cellular agriculture
The advantages of cellular versus animal agriculture. Click on the image to be taken to the website to find out more: WhatIsCultivatedMeat.com (image: “How Cultivated Meat Is Made” reused under the CC BY 4.0 license).
The advantages of cellular versus animal agriculture. Click on the image to be taken to the website to find out more: WhatIsCultivatedMeat.com (image: “How Cultivated Meat Is Made” reused under the CC BY 4.0 license).

There’s a more in-depth discussion of cellular and acellular processes on the Office of the Prime Minister’s Chief Science Advisor website: cellular agriculture.

RethinkX‘s paper, ‘Rethinking Climate Change’ examines the speed of disruptive technologies in the energy, food, and transport sectors (from page 30):

The food disruption will be driven by the economics of precision fermentation (PF) and cellular agriculture (CA), which will compete with animal products of all kinds. Our previous research found that PF will make protein production 5 times cheaper by 2030 and 10 times cheaper by 2035 than existing animal proteins. The precision with which proteins and other complex organic molecules will be produced also means that foods made with them will be higher quality, safer, more consistent, and available in a far wider variety than the animal derived products they replace. The impact of this disruption on industrial animal farming will be profound.

The economic competitiveness of foods made with PF technology will be overwhelming. As the most inefficient and economically vulnerable part of the industrial food system, cow products will be the first to feel the full force of the food disruption. New PF foods will be up to 100 times more land efficient, 10-25 times more feedstock efficient, 20 times more time efficient, and 10 times more water efficient. They will also produce far less waste. By 2030, the number of cows in the United States will have fallen by 50% and the cattle farming industry will be all but bankrupt. All other commercial livestock industries worldwide will quickly follow the same fate, as will commercial fisheries and aquaculture.

This staggering transformation will present an entirely unprecedented opportunity for conservation, rewilding, and reforestation.

If you think people won’t buy much less eat meat, milk, cheese, yoghurt or any other protein products grown in a vat, remember that beer is made the same way.
 
China is getting on board with the technology and their consumers are keen to give it a go. This has huge implications for our export market. And globally, millions of dollars are being invested in the technology. Even Fonterra seems to think investing in it is a good idea.
 
We’ve seen how disruptive technologies have rapidly changed our lifestyles in the past. The Industrial Revolution, mass production, and the Internet are just a few examples that have completely upended every aspect of society. A revolution in food production would do the same. RethinkX have included this helpful reminder of how disruptive technologies evolve (Box 4). Below the image is also a short video on the topic.
 
"We already see indications that incumbent industries in the energy, transportation, and food sector have entered their disruption death spirals because they have begun to lose their social license. For example, many governments have now committed to phasing out fossil fuel use in the energy and transportation sectors, and shareholders are demanding change as the value of firms like ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, and Shell has begun to erode." - RethinkX
“We already see indications that incumbent industries in the energy, transportation, and food sector have entered their disruption death spirals because they have begun to lose their social license. For example, many governments have now committed to phasing out fossil fuel use in the energy and transportation sectors, and shareholders are demanding change as the value of firms like ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, and Shell has begun to erode.” – RethinkX

More information

Earth's orbit is not respinsible for the current warming climate

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This is probably the most common statement you’ll hear from someone who doesn’t believe human activities are changing the climate. It’s much more comfortable to blame something we can’t control, so that we can justify ignoring the problem. But is there any truth to these cycles?

Yes, there is. They’re called Milankovitch Cycles, and they’re named after the geophysicist and astronomer Milutin Milanković.

Milanković developed James Croll’s theory that Earth’s climate changed over long periods (tens of thousands of years) because of the natural variations in the intensity and distribution of solar radiation that reaches the planet, and hence how much warmth we get. This happens for three reasons, so there are in fact three cycles, and they work like this (Fig. 1):

A. Earth wobbles.Technically, this is called ‘axial precession’ and it happens in 23,000 year cycles. depending on which phases the other two cycles that Earth is in, this can either add to cooling or warming.

B. The second cycle is because of Earth’s obliquity that is, the tilt of its axis changes. And this happens over a 41,000-year cycle. Today, as most of the land mass is now in the Northern Hemisphere, when less of that hemisphere is facing the sun in winter, it receives less warmth, so Earth tends to cool slightly.

C. Earth’s orbit around the sun is eccentric, that is, its orbital shape changes in cycles. When Earth is further away from the sun, it receives less solar energy and therefore less warmth, so it tends to get a little cooler. These cycles vary, from 100,000 years to 413,000 years.

Milank cycles

When the compound effect of these cycles are taken together, beginning around 9,000 years ago, Earth should slowly have been entering a cooling cycle. But by then, people had developed agriculture, and the idea was spreading across the planet. Fast.

Changing land use from natural to cultivated and breeding methane-gas producing livestock, sent just enough excess greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere to compensate for the very gradual cooling effect of the natural Milankovitch Cycles. So, while greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere were increasing, the climate remained relatively stable (we’ll talk about the so-called mini Ice Age and the Medieval Warm period in the coming days).

And then came the Industrial Revolution. We started burning huge amounts of fossil fuels, which paved the way to a population explosion and with it, the rapid conversion of carbon-absorbing forests and wetlands into carbon-emitting agriculture, causing Earth to warm faster than any time since the comet took out the dinosaurs. 

So yes, the cycles are real. But the cooling effects of the current cycles are far too small to compensate for our rapid warming of the planet.

Cop 26 Nature

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October 31: that’s the date for the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, COP26. It’s now clear that the Paris target to limit temperatures to 1.5 degrees has failed. Meeting these targets set by governments, including New Zealand, would result in warming well above 3 degrees by 2100.

“We are facing the twin threats of climate change and biodiversity loss. One cannot be solved without addressing the other…. Yet only 3% of global climate finance is spent on nature-based solutions, and only 1% for adaptation.”

One of the three key goals of COP26 is to:

“Protect and restore nature for the benefit of people and climate” and to “call on governments, businesses and civil society to endorse the Leaders’ Pledge for Nature and make ambitious commitments to build nature positive economies and societies.”

In support of this goal, every day from 01 September until October 31, we’ll be posting an extract from this website on Facebook.