Global warming cannot be stopped unless the world’s economy collapses, according to a study by Tim Garrett, professor in atmospheric sciences.
“As civilization increases in (energy) efficiency, that will not lead to a decrease in energy consumption,” Garrett said. “It will cause civilization to grow faster.”
Many scientists have studied the problem of global warming to better understand how carbon dioxide emissions are interacting with the environment and how different ways to combat global warming will change the atmosphere over time, Garrett said. The more efficient the economy becomes, the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere will also increase, and at a quicker pace8212;meaning the economy would have to collapse to stop carbon emissions quickly enough to divert global warming.
“Carbon dioxide emissions from civilization are a major problem that we are trying to understand,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be complicated. If civilization treats it like a physics problem, it becomes a question of energy consumption.”
Garrett compared civilization to a “heat engine,” an old idea found in physics textbooks. In cars, the engine consumes energy in order to function. Civilization as a whole can be viewed in this way. It needs energy to be able to function, and without that energy, it would be useless, he said.
Garrett then compared civilization to a growing child. A child needs food to be able to grow. This also applies to civilization8212;the more energy it consumes, the larger it will grow. Because of this, as it becomes more efficient in the production of energy, the more energy it will need to be able to function, he said.
Current rates would require about 300 gigawatts of non-carbon dioxide-emitting power production annually just to stabilize the atmosphere, Garrett said in a statement. The more energy it uses, the larger it grows, so Garrett suggested that the only way to stabilize the amount of carbon dioxide emissions is to build one new nuclear power plant a day. The only other way is for the world’s economy to collapse.
Garrett has been studying how carbon dioxide relates to the economy for a few years now, but he has had difficulty finding a journal to publish his findings, he said. He believes there is a close link between the two, he said.
“It’s a different application to what is normally used by economists,” Garrett said. “I showed it to colleagues with more physics backgrounds, and to them it seemed relatively obvious.”
The study will be published online in the journal Climate Change.