CLIMATE CHANGE MADE QUICK AND EASY.

Too bad vested interests are illegitimately blocking efforts to mitigate climate change by sowing doubt about legitimate climate science. Climate change mitigation could boost food security and save millions of lives, according to the latest NASA-LED study published last month in Science.

Last week climate deniers were further exposed for what they really are: Paid industry propagandists. According to an article in Scientific American, leaked documents show the Heartland Institute, funded in part by ultraconservative American billionaire Charles Koch, funds vocal climate change skeptics who sow doubt about climate science where none exists.

Meanwhile, actual climate scientists who really do study our changing climate are proposing some very interesting solutions.

The title of the Science article by lead author Drew Shindell says it all: Simultaneously Mitigating Near-term Climate Change and Improving Human Health and Food Security. It seems that many measures to fight climate change are also beneficial to the economy, agriculture and health. Shindell’s proposal has the added benefit of working faster than previous proposals, which tend to focus on carbon dioxide emissions.

The researchers propose a focus on 14 measures that tar- get methane and black carbon emissions. Together, they could reduce projected global warming by 0.5 C by 2050. Measures designed to control carbon dioxide emissions — the biggest contributor to climate change — would take much longer to affect change. Shindell isn’t suggesting these aren’t necessary too, but that controlling methane and black carbon is a cheaper, faster and easier way to kickstart climate mitigation.

The proposal targets seven sources of methane emissions: Coal mining, oil and gas production, long-distance gas transmission, municipal waste and landfills, wastewater, livestock manure and rice paddies.

The other targets sources of black carbon emissions from incomplete combustion and include technical measures covering diesel vehicles, clean-burning biomass stoves, brick kilns and coke ovens, as well as regulatory measures including banning agricultural waste burning, eliminating high-emitting vehicles and providing modern cooking and heating.

The interesting things about these measures is that they are all doable right now with existing technology; it’s just a matter of plugging leaks, adding filters to vehicles and improving cook stoves. All these measures have spinoff benefits.

Black carbon, for example, is the sooty emission from diesel vehicles and cooking fires. Some three billion people still use fires for cooking; switching to inexpensive, cleaner burning stoves cuts emissions and prevents lung disease. The measures proposed could save 4.7 million premature deaths annually.

Reducing methane emissions would boost global crop yields by up to 135 million tonnes, boosting food security. The cost of methane reductions, by such measures as fixing leaks in pipelines, is thought to be about $250 per tonne or less. The benefits in terms of crop yield and resulting nutritional improvements are expected to be in the range of $700 to $5,000 per tonne.

While this approach to mitigating climate change makes sense and benefits the public purse, it does involve upfront costs that have to be paid, in part, by private industry, which is why some companies oppose climate change action. In reality, these companies will recover the costs over time, through increased efficiencies, but we all tend to think in the short term.

In fact, this is the crux of the climate change debate. Human beings are genetically programed to think in terms of their personal/familial short-term needs. Yet most of our problems today are collective and long term.

What we need now is for culture to overtake genetic programming. We need to enhance our capacity to see the big picture, to think in terms of the long-term needs of humanity, not our personal short-term needs. Or, more to the point, we need to see that our short-term needs are actually best served by meeting the long-term needs.

Unfortunately, vested interests with a lot of money at their disposal are actively opposed to a collective vision of the future, and they are deliberately spreading mistruths to achieve their goals.