Net zero is not enough. What would it take to save the ice, and the lives that depend on it?
Four short briefings, prepared with Claude, follow one climate model from today to 2100.
Part 1, The Road to Net Zero: a realistic transition reaches net zero around 2074. Warming peaks near 2.1 °C and stays there. Net zero stops the warming from rising, but it does not bring temperatures down.
Part 2, Net Zero Plus Carbon Removal: pulling CO₂ back out of the air on an enormous scale could cool the planet to about 0.8 °C by 2100. It would mean removing roughly twice today’s total emissions every year.
Addendum A, Climate-Related Deaths: heat from human-caused warming already kills about 350,000 people a year. About 15 million more will die before 2050 whatever we do now. By 2100 the toll reaches about 66 million on the realistic path, or 37 million with large-scale carbon removal.
Addendum B, Cooling to Save the Ice, and Lives
What the ice needs: the Arctic and Greenland need a climate near that of the 1980s, about 0.6 °C above pre-industrial. That is roughly 0.8 °C cooler than today.
Lives saved: deliberately cooling the planet could save about 40 to 46 million lives this century.
The catch: it must never stop suddenly. A sudden halt in 2070 would bring back 0.9 °C of warming in six years and cost some 19 million lives. With carbon removal underneath, the same halt is far less dangerous.
All of these figures are conservative. They count only deaths from heat and leave out tipping points.
So the question is no longer what it would cost. It is what risks the people alive today are willing to take, and what commitment they will make, to spare future generations a loss they could never undo.
Climate-related death tolls associated with the previous “briefing” posts—Part 1 of 2 (The Road to Net Zero) and Part 2 of 2 (Net Zero Plus Carbon Removal)—is a 6-page PDF laid out like the two “briefings.” It re-draws earlier CO₂ chart created by Claude following my instructions, with the “briefing” scenarios and adds a single climate-deaths graph.
To keep everything in sync, Claude rebuilt the same kind of carbon-cycle and climate model the “briefings” use. It reproduces their key figures closely: CO₂ peaking around 483 ppm on the realistic path and 463 ppm with carbon removal, and warming peaking around 2.1 °C and 1.9 °C. Claude then ran the “net zero by 2050” path through it as a fourth scenario.
Deaths are tied to each path’s warming. The low end of the range is matched to Bressler (2021) and the high end to Carleton et al. (2022), and the result checks out against the Lancet Countdown’s figure for today’s heat deaths.
What the deaths graph shows:
Today: about 350,000 deaths a year (range 220,000–575,000), counting deaths from heat and temperature only.
2026 to 2050: about 15 million deaths on every path. Warming lags emissions, so the next 25 years are largely locked in.
Total by 2100:
Path
Deaths, 2026–2100
Emissions stay flat
~87 million
Realistic net zero (~2074)
~66 million
Net zero by 2050
~52 million
Net zero + carbon removal
~37 million
The key message: net zero stops the annual rate of death from rising but not the dying—millions of people continue to die. Deaths level off at roughly 0.75–1 million a year and stay there. Only cooling brings them back down.
These scenarios sit at the low end of the risk. They leave out climate tipping points, such as ice-sheet collapse, permafrost thaw and a shutdown of the Atlantic ocean circulation, because their timing is still debated. That uncertainty is not a reason to wait. It is a warning that argues for speed and early action rather than further delay.
Preface – Two “briefings” (Part 1 and Part 2) prepared by Claude AI under my instructions—drawing on four previous queries in May—are quite deep and dense with assumptions, numbers and dates, so I asked Claude to prepare a synopsis and synthesis of the two (this preface is being added to Part 1 as well). Following is what Claude prepared in summary, intended as a letter or email of transmittal to people of influence::
Two climate briefings, in plain English
These are two short briefings on what it would take to stabilize the climate. They are dense, so here is the gist of each and what they mean together.
1. The Road to Net Zero. This briefing asks what happens if the world keeps decarbonizing at a realistic pace. Power plants and cars clean up first. Airplanes, ships, steel and cement come last, so true global “net zero” (no more CO₂ added each year) arrives around 2065–2080, not 2050. CO₂ in the air keeps climbing to about 480 ppm around 2060, compared with 432 today, and then drifts down only slowly. Warming passes 1.5 °C around 2030 and peaks near 2.1 °C around 2070. After that it levels off but does not fall. The transition costs more up front, but lower fuel bills pay it back by about 2070, and the overall economy comes out ahead from the 2040s on. Net zero stops the damage from getting worse. It does not undo the damage already done.
2. Net Zero Plus Carbon Removal. This briefing asks what it would take to go further and actually return the atmosphere to pre-industrial CO₂ levels of about 280–300 ppm. The answer is an industry that pulls CO₂ back out of the air through forests, soils, crushed rock and machines. By 2080 it would have to remove about 85 billion tonnes a year, roughly twice what the whole world emits today. If that were done, warming would peak near 1.9 °C around 2052, drop back below 1.5 °C around 2074, and fall to about 0.8 °C by 2100. The price is about $8 trillion a year, around $215 trillion in total. It only makes economic sense once you count the climate damage it prevents, because removing carbon saves no one any money on fuel. The oceans also push back: as CO₂ is pulled from the air, the seas release some of what they absorbed. Nearly half of every tonne removed is cancelled out this way.
Taken together. The two briefings agree on three hard truths:
Cutting emissions is necessary but not enough. Even a successful transition leaves us stuck at about 2 °C for centuries.
The only way back down is to take carbon out. That takes an effort as large as the energy transition itself, built alongside it and not in place of it, and it would have to keep running indefinitely to hold the gains.
The cost of acting is real, but the cost of not acting is larger. Once avoided climate damage is counted, both paths leave the world economy better off, and the sooner we start, the cheaper it gets.
Think of the first briefing as turning off the tap. The second briefing is about bailing out the bathtub, and the bathtub keeps leaking water back in.
The carbon-removal scenario is best read as an upper bound on what it would take, not a forecast of what will happen. It is several times larger than anything in the IPCC’s pathways, and neither briefing models tipping points such as ice-sheet collapse.
With best regards, Doug Grandt
Claude added this final editorial which does not require action as the difference noted will probably only be noticed by the most intense reviewer, for which these are not intended:
I noticed one thing worth fixing before you send. Section 3 of the carbon-removal riefing says the net-zero-only path “peaks higher than in the companion briefing: about 482 ppm … rather than 463 ppm.” But 463 ppm is the carbon-removal path’s own peak. The companion briefing’s figure is about 480 ppm, so the two briefings actually agree. The sentence should say that, or be dropped.
Preface – Two “briefings” (Part 1 and Part 2) prepared by Claude AI under my instructions—drawing on four previous queries in May—are quite deep and dense with assumptions, numbers and dates, so I asked Claude to prepare a synopsis and synthesis of the two (this preface is being added to Part 2 as well). Following is what Claude prepared in summary, intended as a letter or email of transmittal to people of influence::
Two climate briefings, in plain English
These are two short briefings on what it would take to stabilize the climate. They are dense, so here is the gist of each and what they mean together.
1. The Road to Net Zero. This briefing asks what happens if the world keeps decarbonizing at a realistic pace. Power plants and cars clean up first. Airplanes, ships, steel and cement come last, so true global “net zero” (no more CO₂ added each year) arrives around 2065–2080, not 2050. CO₂ in the air keeps climbing to about 480 ppm around 2060, compared with 432 today, and then drifts down only slowly. Warming passes 1.5 °C around 2030 and peaks near 2.1 °C around 2070. After that it levels off but does not fall. The transition costs more up front, but lower fuel bills pay it back by about 2070, and the overall economy comes out ahead from the 2040s on. Net zero stops the damage from getting worse. It does not undo the damage already done.
2. Net Zero Plus Carbon Removal. This briefing asks what it would take to go further and actually return the atmosphere to pre-industrial CO₂ levels of about 280–300 ppm. The answer is an industry that pulls CO₂ back out of the air through forests, soils, crushed rock and machines. By 2080 it would have to remove about 85 billion tonnes a year, roughly twice what the whole world emits today. If that were done, warming would peak near 1.9 °C around 2052, drop back below 1.5 °C around 2074, and fall to about 0.8 °C by 2100. The price is about $8 trillion a year, around $215 trillion in total. It only makes economic sense once you count the climate damage it prevents, because removing carbon saves no one any money on fuel. The oceans also push back: as CO₂ is pulled from the air, the seas release some of what they absorbed. Nearly half of every tonne removed is cancelled out this way.
Taken together. The two briefings agree on three hard truths:
Cutting emissions is necessary but not enough. Even a successful transition leaves us stuck at about 2 °C for centuries.
The only way back down is to take carbon out. That takes an effort as large as the energy transition itself, built alongside it and not in place of it, and it would have to keep running indefinitely to hold the gains.
The cost of acting is real, but the cost of not acting is larger. Once avoided climate damage is counted, both paths leave the world economy better off, and the sooner we start, the cheaper it gets.
Think of the first briefing as turning off the tap. The second briefing is about bailing out the bathtub, and the bathtub keeps leaking water back in.
The carbon-removal scenario is best read as an upper bound on what it would take, not a forecast of what will happen. It is several times larger than anything in the IPCC’s pathways, and neither briefing models tipping points such as ice-sheet collapse.
With best regards, Doug Grandt
Claude added this final editorial which does not require action as the difference noted will probably only be noticed by the most intense reviewer, for which these are not intended: “
I noticed one thing worth fixing before you send. Section 3 of the carbon-removal briefing says the net-zero-only path “peaks higher than in the companion briefing: about 482 ppm … rather than 463 ppm.” But 463 ppm is the carbon-removal path’s own peak. The companion briefing’s figure is about 480 ppm, so the two briefings actually agree. The sentence should say that, or be dropped.
(the elephant in the room follows Quico Toro’s Substack piece … dessert)
This guy explains clearly the fundamental mistake my recent cartoons attempt to explain in a quick glance … more related posts to follow … hope you get the point that it’s urgent we shift from dogma to real sci real quick. Image previews in the comments …. no words … Quico Toro says it clearly enough
The rounding error climate activists spend all their time fighting over
As long as I can remember, first world climate activists have been organizing politically to get their countries to curb greenhouse gas emissions. The tendency is to treat climate as part of their country’s politics: their issue in the national political conversation. Typically, this manifests as impassioned advocacy for wind and solar energy, which is often what people mean by “climate” in the political arena.
This strategy goes by a pithy, four word slogan: ““decarbonize electricity, electrify everything.” This approach has been so dominant for so long that climate people just don’t question it.
But it’s not a good strategy. For six related reasons:
Electricity is a small fraction of the energy we use.
Many energy-intensive activities can’t be electrified.
Rich countries emit a small and decreasing share of global emissions.
Energy is only one of the sources of greenhouse gas emissions.
Greenhouse gases are only one of the ways people change the climate.
New greenhouse gas flows are a tiny percentage of the stock of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
Taken together, this means that even if first world climate activist got everything they’re fighting for, that would barely slow climate change.
To be clear, decarbonizing electric generation where you live is still a good idea, though more on air quality grounds than on climate grounds. As climate strategy, though, it makes no sense.
Let’s see why.
1. Electricity is only about 20% of the energy we use. The rest is direct fuel consumption for transportation, heating, and heavy industry. Some of those things can be electrified, but it’s expensive. We’re currently spending more than $2 trillion a yearon the energy transition, yet just 16% of primary energy use is from low-carbon sources, and most of that is hydropower (now mostly tapped out), nuclear (which greens still refuse to back) and biomass. After spending $11 trillion on them, wind and solar account for 3.3% of primary energy use. Which may make you think we should try to electrify faster, which would be nice, except:
2-Many energy-intensive activities can’t be electrified. The the so-called “hard-to-abate sectors” — cement-making, steel-making and petrochemicals ‚ emit carbon dioxide directly as part of their irreducible chemistry. Cement alone, if it were a country, would vie with India for the spot of third-largest emitter on Earth.
Other sectors are electrifiable in principle, but wildly impractical to electrify in practice. Jet fuel packs forty to fifty times more energy per kilogram than the best lithium-ion batteries, which is why an electric airliner’s batteries would weigh more than the airliner. You can, theoretically, run a container ship on green hydrogen, it’s just that it costs an arm and a leg. Any country or company that tried to mandate these solutions would put itself out of business.
Which is why electricity today covers only about a fifth of final energy use, and even the IEA’s most aggressive net-zero scenario — a scenario nobody really thinks is viable — only gets that to about half by 2050.
So you can’t really electrify everything. But even if you could decarbonize your country’s entire energy sector —which you can’t— it wouldn’t solve the problem because:
3-The places where most climate activists live are not the places where emissions are rising. The countries where climate activists are numerous enough to matter — largely rich Western countries — account for a small and falling share of global emissions. All emissions growth now comes from outside the rich country bubble. For all the talk about Chinese Solar, in 2024 China started construction on roughly a new coal plant’s worth of capacity every week. The entirety of the problem with emissions is about the Global South, where decarbonization has no political traction and renewables exist mostly as a way of sidestepping corrupt/useless utilities.
But even if there was a way to decarbonize energy in the developing world quickly, which there isn’t, that wouldn’t be the end of the story, because:
4-The energy sector is not the whole of the greenhouse gas problem. Agriculture, deforestation, cement chemistry and waste — sources that have nothing to do with how we make energy — account for over a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions: more than all the cars, trucks, ships and planes combined. It is one of the most well-established laws of economic development that as people leave poverty, they demand more animal protein. Other than a vague wish for people to go vegan, the standard first world climate activist approach simply has nothing to say about the non-energy sources of GHGs.
And even if you could end non-energy emissions, which you can’t, it turns out that:
5-Greenhouse gases themselves are only one of the ways human activity is changing the climate: changes in albedo account for a rising share of the warming trend we’re seeing. The specifics are hotly contested, but the world is getting literally darker. We have fewer bright clouds, less arctic ice cover, less cloud cover from maritime “ship tracks,” and also fewer reflective particles from sulfur pollution to offset warming. Altogether, something like a tenth to a fifth of a degree of the warming we’ve seen this decade comes from falling albedo, not from greenhouse gas emissions — record-low albedo alone may account for 0.2°C of 2023’s temperature spike. This appears to be the reason why global warming is accelerating even though greenhouse gas emissions are coming in towards the lower end of the prediction range.
So “decarbonize electricity, electrify everything” is not just wrong, it’s damaging. Because it’s wrong in a particularly insidious kind of way: it lulls people into thinking they’re backing a comprehensive strategy when they’re doing nothing of the sort. You end up with a movement fighting for goals that are at the same time 1-not attainable, and also 2-would not get you where you want to go even if they were attained.
This is why I have so little patience for climate-as-activist-politics.
Devoting your climate activist juices to parochial fights over how your electricity is generated means focusing on a tiny section of one part of one aspect of a much bigger problem —how humanity changes atmospheric chemistry— which itself is not the whole of the problem of human impacts on climate.
America’s electricity sector emits about 1.7 billion tonnes of CO₂ a year, against roughly 55 billion tonnes of global greenhouse emissions. So the stuff that makes up the vast bulk of activist climate energy in the U.S. is a fight over roughly 3% of the global drivers of climate change. For EU activists, the figure is about 1%. For Japanese activists, a bit under 1%. For British activists, a pathetic 0.06% — the UK’s entire power sector now emits less in a year than China’s does in three days.
First world climate activists could win every single one of the fights they’re in, and they’d have solved 5% of the problem. A political program that has nothing to say about 95% of the problem it sets out to address is not a political program that deserves respect.
And even that 5% is charitable, because:
6-Focusing on emission flows ignores the stock of anthropogenic CO₂ that’s already built up in the atmosphere. This is an issue mainstream climate activism refuses to discuss, in part because it has no idea what to do about it. Think in stocks rather than flows and first world climate activism collapses to a rounding error: humanity has emitted some 2,500 GTs of CO₂ since 1750, of which about 1,150 GTs are still sitting in the atmosphere.
More than half of that total went up after 1990 — we have emitted more CO₂ since the IPCC’s first report than in all of human history before it. The not-quite 3 GTs a year of first world electricity emissions that take up first world climate activist mindspace to the exclusion of all else are one quarter of one percent of the accumulated problem.
There’s a failure to register the actual scale of the problem here that drives me around the bend. In graphic form, it looks like this:
A movement that can’t even wholeheartedly back the best technology we have for dispatchable zero-carbon electricity —nuclear— isn’t a serious movement. A movement uninterested in developing affordable ways to remove greenhouse gas from the atmosphere doesn’t deserve the monopoly it has on climate discourse. A movement that won’t even discuss the loss of albedo forefeits the right to decree what is and is not sayable about the climate.
The climate movement today, the movement that sets policy for the Democratic Party in the U.S. and the Labour Party in Britain, the movement that drives the UNFCCC’s discussions and the climate desks at legacy media outlets, isn’t serious about climate.
My visual “creative art” created a few years ago illustrates the magnitude of the difference between atmospheric CO2 concentration (elephant) vs. annual global CO2 emissions (basket of apples)
My “graphic” created a few days ago illustrates the magnitude of the difference between a CO2 emissions (bronze curve) —not tonnes, rather ppm equivalent— and Keeling Curve CO2 atmospheric concentration (green curve) both of which are rising at an accelerating rate vs. the apparent decoupled annual global CO2 emissions (red curve) which appear to have stabilized in the past few years.
This set of curves was generated by Claude AI based on my vision and iterative instructions, correcting Claude’s non-human inability to visualize what I described in text, until the result was simple and clear enough for the layperson and scientist or policy-maker to quickly grasp the predicament we face:
HOW QUICKLY CAN WE POSSIBLY TURN THE TRAJECTORY INTO A COOLING TREND?
Global Mean Surface Temperature follows the total CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, hence to bend the warming trend downward into a cooling trend will require reducing the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere as well as in the ocean as the two will equilibrate as CO2 is removed and sequestered in the soil, vegetation or send into the abyss of the ocean as solid organic compounds (e.g., phytoplankton, krill, kelp, whale poop, calcium carbonate, etc.)
Claude is very intelligent, and has assisted me organizing my experiences and thoughts as well as articulating complex concepts clearly and concisely. Following is Claud’s explanation of the curves:
The Keeling Curve, with emissions stacked on top
Two lines, both starting from the same point in 1959: the actual measured CO2 level (green), and a hypothetical line (bronze) built by adding each year’s global emissions on top of that same starting point, as if nothing were ever absorbed. The gap that opens up between them is what’s been sequestered. Annual emissions sit on their own right-hand scale below, so their rising trend stays visible.
Reading it: both lines start at 316 ppm in 1959. The bronze line just keeps adding that year’s emissions on top, year after year, as if the atmosphere kept every molecule ever released. The green line is what actually happened. They separate almost immediately and keep widening: by 2024 the bronze line reaches about 514 ppm, while the actual atmosphere measures 425 ppm — a gap of roughly 89 ppm.
That gap is the running total of everything land and ocean sinks have pulled back out of the air since 1959. The right-hand axis shows the annual flow behind it: emissions climbing from ~1.1 ppm-equivalent/yr in 1959 to ~4.8 ppm-equivalent/yr in 2024.
Sources & method: Mauna Loa annual-mean CO2 is the actual Scripps/NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory record (1959 is the first complete annual mean; Keeling’s instrumental record began March 1958).
Annual global fossil CO2 emissions are approximate figures reconstructed from published Global Carbon Project / Global Carbon Budget benchmarks, interpolated year-to-year through documented turning points (1974 oil shock, early-1980s recession, 1991-93 Soviet collapse, 2009 financial crisis, 2020 pandemic).
The bronze line is the 1959 starting ppm (315.98) plus the running sum of that emissions series, converted to ppm using 1 ppm CO2 = 7.81 GtCO2 (2.13 GtC/ppm × 3.664 GtCO/GtC).
Land-use-change emissions (deforestation, etc.) are excluded throughout for methodological consistency – including them would push the bronze line, and the sequestration gap, higher still. Emissions figures are illustrative of scale and trend, not precise official annual statistics.
Have you ever seen CO2 concentration in the atmosphere (ppm) calculated based on actual emissions juxtaposed with the Keeling Mauna Loa observed atmospheric concentration?
The chart below shows CO2ppm scaled on the left y-axis, ranging from 300ppm to 530ppm.
The top BRONZE CURVE is calculated ppm equivalent of global emissions accumulations since David Keeling began taking atmospheric CO2 concentrations at Mauna Loa, Hawaii.
The middle GREEN CURVE is the traditional KEELING CURVE
The difference between the GREEN and BRONZE curves is what has been sequestered into the ocean, vegetation and soil.
The bottom RED CURVE is global annual CO2 emissions which start to level off a bit in recent years. CO2ppm scale on the right y-axis shows atmospheric concentration additions from annual emissions having climbed four-fold from ~1.1 ppm-equivalent/yr in 1959 to ~4.8 ppm-equivalent/yr in 2024.
This set of curves was generated by Claude AI based on my vision and iterative instructions, correcting Claude’s non-human inability to visualize what I described in text, until the result was simple and clear enough for the layperson and scientist or policy-maker to quickly grasp the predicament we face:
HOW QUICKLY CAN WE POSSIBLY TURN THE TRAJECTORY INTO A COOLING TREND?
Global Mean Surface Temperature follows the total CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, hence to bend the warming trend downward into a cooling trend will require reducing the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere as well as in the ocean as the two will equilibrate as CO2 is removed and sequestered in the soil, vegetation or send into the abyss of the ocean as solid organic compounds (e.g., phytoplankton, krill, kelp, whale poop, calcium carbonate, etc.)
Claude is very intelligent, and has assisted me organizing my experiences and thoughts as well as articulating complex concepts clearly and concisely. Following is Claud’s explanation of the curves:
The Keeling Curve, with emissions stacked on top
Two lines, both starting from the same point in 1959: the actual measured CO2 level (green), and a hypothetical line (bronze) built by adding each year’s global emissions on top of that same starting point, as if nothing were ever absorbed. The gap that opens up between them is what’s been sequestered. Annual emissions sit on their own right-hand scale below, so their rising trend stays visible.
Reading it: both lines start at 316 ppm in 1959. The bronze line just keeps adding that year’s emissions on top, year after year, as if the atmosphere kept every molecule ever released. The green line is what actually happened. They separate almost immediately and keep widening: by 2024 the bronze line reaches about 514 ppm, while the actual atmosphere measures 425 ppm — a gap of roughly 89 ppm.
That gap is the running total of everything land and ocean sinks have pulled back out of the air since 1959. The right-hand axis shows the annual flow behind it: emissions climbing from ~1.1 ppm-equivalent/yr in 1959 to ~4.8 ppm-equivalent/yr in 2024.
Sources & method: Mauna Loa annual-mean CO2 is the actual Scripps/NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory record (1959 is the first complete annual mean; Keeling’s instrumental record began March 1958).
Annual global fossil CO2 emissions are approximate figures reconstructed from published Global Carbon Project / Global Carbon Budget benchmarks, interpolated year-to-year through documented turning points (1974 oil shock, early-1980s recession, 1991-93 Soviet collapse, 2009 financial crisis, 2020 pandemic).
The bronze line is the 1959 starting ppm (315.98) plus the running sum of that emissions series, converted to ppm using 1 ppm CO2 = 7.81 GtCO2 (2.13 GtC/ppm × 3.664 GtCO/GtC).
Land-use-change emissions (deforestation, etc.) are excluded throughout for methodological consistency – including them would push the bronze line, and the sequestration gap, higher still. Emissions figures are illustrative of scale and trend, not precise official annual statistics.
BY CAITLIN YILEK | UPDATED ON: APRIL 4, 2023 / 7:21 PM | CBS NEWS
Former President Donald Trump has been charged by a New York grand jury with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in an indictment that was unsealed Tuesday after Trump was arraigned in a Manhattan courtroom. Trump pleaded not guilty to all charges.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office alleges Trump orchestrated a “catch and kill” scheme to suppress damaging information before the 2016 election. Prosecutors say the scheme involved falsifying business records to conceal three payments, including $130,000 that Trump attorney Michael Cohen paid to adult film star Stormy Daniels.
“The defendant DONALD J. TRUMP repeatedly and fraudulently falsified New York business records to conceal criminal conduct that hid damaging information from the voting public during the 2016 presidential election,” according to a statement of facts released alongside the indictment.
