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| Titel |
No way out? The double-bind in seeking global prosperity alongside mitigated climate change |
| VerfasserIn |
T. J. Garrett |
| Medientyp |
Artikel
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| Sprache |
Englisch
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| ISSN |
2190-4979
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| Digitales Dokument |
URL |
| Erschienen |
In: Earth System Dynamics ; 3, no. 1 ; Nr. 3, no. 1 (2012-01-05), S.1-17 |
| Datensatznummer |
250000846
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| Publikation (Nr.) |
 copernicus.org/esd-3-1-2012.pdf |
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| Zusammenfassung |
| In a prior study (Garrett, 2011), I introduced a
simple economic growth model designed to be consistent
with general thermodynamic laws. Unlike traditional
economic models, civilization is viewed only as a
well-mixed global whole with no distinction made between individual nations,
economic sectors, labor, or capital investments. At the model core is a
hypothesis that the global economy's current rate of primary energy
consumption is tied through a constant to a very general representation of
its historically accumulated wealth. Observations support this hypothesis,
and indicate that the constant's value is λ = 9.7 ± 0.3
milliwatts per 1990 US dollar. It is this link that allows for treatment of
seemingly complex economic systems as simple physical systems. Here, this
growth model is coupled to a linear formulation for the evolution of globally
well-mixed atmospheric CO2 concentrations. While very simple, the
coupled model provides faithful multi-decadal hindcasts of trajectories in
gross world product (GWP) and CO2. Extending the model to the future,
the model suggests that the well-known IPCC SRES scenarios substantially
underestimate how much CO2 levels will rise for a given level of future
economic prosperity. For one, global CO2 emission rates cannot be
decoupled from wealth through efficiency gains. For another, like a long-term
natural disaster, future greenhouse warming can be expected to act as an
inflationary drag on the real growth of global wealth. For atmospheric
CO2 concentrations to remain below a "dangerous" level of 450 ppmv
(Hansen et al., 2007), model forecasts suggest that there will have to
be some combination of an unrealistically rapid rate of energy
decarbonization and nearly immediate reductions in global civilization
wealth. Effectively, it appears that civilization may be in a double-bind. If
civilization does not collapse quickly this century, then CO2 levels
will likely end up exceeding 1000 ppmv; but, if CO2 levels rise by this
much, then the risk is that civilization will gradually tend towards
collapse. |
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