Chris Field
About
Climate scientist; Director of Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment; former IPCC coordinating lead author and co-chair
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Claims by Chris Field (20 of 26)
Photovoltaic Electricity Now Cheaper Than Fossil
Electricity from photovoltaics is now cheaper than electricity from fossil fuels in almost every part of the world, and substantial progress has been made integrating large amounts of renewable electricity into the grid, undercutting the claim that decarbonization must be economically ruinous.
Our Own Choices Are the Biggest Climate Uncertainty
The biggest source of uncertainty about future warming is what humans choose to do: ambitious mitigation could limit warming to 1.5-2°C, while continued high emissions could produce a global average temperature 4-5°C warmer than pre-industrial by 2100.
Realistic Outcome Near 2°C, Worth the Effort
Field expects we will not achieve the very best outcomes but will likely end up close to 2°C, perhaps a couple of tenths above it, with incalculable damage from missing the Paris goal—yet being at 2 or 2.2°C is far better than 3.5 or 4°C, so the effort to limit warming is worthwhile.
Water Vapor Amplifies CO2 Warming but Is Uncontrollable
Water vapor is a powerful greenhouse gas that amplifies CO2 warming by more than half through a vicious cycle—more CO2 warms the air, a warmer atmosphere holds more water vapor, which warms it further—but because atmospheric water content is set by temperature over a 70%-ocean planet, it is not a lever we can control, with the one wrinkle that jet aircraft deliver water vapor to the stratosphere where it lingers and warms longer.
Durable Political Coalition Is the Biggest Challenge
The biggest challenge in transitioning to a low-carbon economy is building a durable political coalition around climate action, because without a predictable long-term landscape, entities like utilities, auto manufacturers, and energy producers cannot make the long-term investments needed, and policies and funding (like the Inflation Reduction Act) can be reversed by the next election.
Climate Transition Stalls on Displaced Interests and Siting
A durable climate coalition requires seriously addressing what happens to coal mining communities, oil and gas states, and fossil-exporting nations, and resolving siting conflicts where people favor offshore wind or utility-scale solar except where they see the windmills or where it affects an endangered species—barriers that are purely in the human dimension rather than technological.
Climate Change Is Serious But Not Civilization-Ending
Even under successful mitigation limiting warming to Paris goals, climate impacts will be existential for some regions like low-lying islands and coastal areas and many people will die unnecessarily, but the conditions are not likely to be existential for humanity, society, or the global economy; it is a problem worth addressing because we have leverage on the future, not because we are on the edge of a civilization-ending precipice.
Arrhenius Made Accurate CO2 Warming Prediction in 1896
In 1896 Svante Arrhenius identified the three key factors needed to forecast CO2-driven warming—that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, that a warmer atmosphere holds more water vapor which amplifies warming, and that added CO2 gradually partitions so about 80% ends up in the oceans—and used them to make a back-of-the-envelope calculation of warming from doubling CO2 that, while not exact, was remarkably close, demonstrating the deep and durable foundation of climate science.
Personal Experience of Changing Climate Since 2010
Since about 2010, almost everyone has personal experience that the climate is different than it was a few years ago—many more heat waves and heavy precipitation events—exactly the kinds of changes the climate science community had been predicting for decades.
International Climate Finance Serves Rich-World Interests
Financial assistance for accelerating the energy transition in poor countries may be in the rich world's own interest because it decreases risks like political instability, and this may show up in subtle mechanisms such as changes to how the World Bank and IMF structure their loan portfolios.
Carbon Capture and Fossil-Plus-CCS for Reliability Margins
Continuing to use fossil fuel resources connected with carbon capture and storage—pumping compressed CO2 into underground formations, a technique already used in oil and gas extraction—is valuable especially at the margins for providing the last increment of reliability and filling gaps where renewables fall short, particularly for countries with already-deployed infrastructure.
Declining Global Burn Area Masks Regional Fire Increases
The consistent decline in global area burned over recent decades is entirely a story of African savanna fires—which make up three quarters of global annual burn area and are driven by changing agricultural and rangeland practices—while fire-prone forested regions like the western United States, the Mediterranean, and Australia have seen dramatic increases in area burned and devastating loss of life.
Extreme Events, Not Average Warming, Are the Threat
An average warming of two to four degrees Fahrenheit is not existential for most people in most places, but the warming-driven increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme events—heat waves, heavy precipitation—is the real danger, both because the distribution of climate outcomes shifts and because a warmer climate becomes more variable.
World Has Moved Off the Worst-Case Emissions Pathway
A decade ago we appeared headed for the worst-case RCP 8.5 high-emissions pathway, but technological progress and policies implemented in the last decade have shifted the most-likely outcome to between Paris-compliant 1.5-2°C and about 3°C, meaning we have already effectively solved roughly a quarter to a third of the total climate problem through modest deployment of affordable, known technologies.
Western US Wildfires Driven by Three Compounding Factors
The dramatic increase in western North American wildfire severity results from three compounding factors: decades of fire suppression that allowed accumulation of highly flammable material, a large influx of people into the wildland-urban interface, and climate change increasing the tendency of forests to generate unmanageable conflagrations.
Ice Ages Provide Evidence CO2 Drives Climate
Ice core temperature proxies from Greenland and Antarctica (annual resolution back thousands of years, nearly a million years from Antarctica) show periods both warmer and colder than today, and reconstructions of ice ages over the last several million years provide some of the best evidence that carbon dioxide drives changes in climate.
Temperature Record Is Robust and Independently Verified
We have a high-confidence global temperature record going back to around 1880 based on tens of thousands of land stations and millions of ocean observations, carefully filtered for urbanization and gaps; a Berkeley group that set out to prove the record was flawed instead found it spectacularly good and matching NASA and the UK Met Office, and satellite data, once orbital dynamics were corrected, became essentially identical to thermometer records.
Pinatubo Demonstrates Solar Geoengineering Potential
The 1991 Mount Pinatubo eruption put large amounts of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere and cooled the planet by nearly 1°F for about two years, demonstrating that injecting aerosols into the stratosphere (solar geoengineering) could prevent some warming—using far less material than would be needed near the surface because stratospheric aerosols stay for one to two years and don't directly harm human health.
Nuclear Struggles to Compete on Price and Scale
Nuclear power is non-emitting and worth encouraging, but it will likely struggle to compete in most parts of the world because renewables are so cheap and because each increment of nuclear capacity requires hundreds of millions of dollars, making it hard to experiment, whereas photovoltaics and windmills scale in tiny increments.
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