Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Appendix II
What Will Happen in the Future If We Do
Nothing or If We Try Very Hard to
Aggressively Reduce GHG Emissions:
Projected Change Under Different
Emission Scenarios
The ultimate cause of our present climate warming is the massive input of greenhouse gases
(GHGs) to the atmosphere due to human activity over the last 200 or more years. Intergov-
ernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) AR4 and AR5 confirm the high level of confid-
ence of the global scientific community in making this statement. However, the future is still
largely in our hands. We have already injected so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere
to commit the globe to a certain degree of warming. Nevertheless, it is still just possible that
actions taken today could limit the amount of warming to be not far from the range with-
in which our civilizations have developed. What will happen next depends entirely on how
our energy-driven world economies evolve. Therefore, to look into the future, we have to
combine scenarios for global economic development and then calculate what their individu-
al climate impact may be. The first step has been to quantify the relationship between carbon
dioxide emission and variables indicative of how economies and societies may evolve over
the next 100 years. The following are examples of these variables (which for simplicity only
consider CO
2
):
·
Global population level (GPL):
The higher the population, the greater the global
demand is for energy.
·
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