Humanity’s impact on the climate is clear and devastating. Over the last two hundred years or so, we have pumped enough greenhouse gas into the atmosphere to significantly increase its temperature and raise the frightening prospect of much of the Earth becoming uninhabitable.
The current plan to avoid this fate is to reduce net carbon emissions to zero within the next 20 years. That will surely help, provided Earth has not moved beyond any significant tipping points by then.
But there is another problem looming that net zero will do little to mitigate. The so-called “deep warming” problem comes from the unavoidable fact that almost all energy humans use ultimately ends up in the environment as low-level heat. That’s all the energy from solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal, fossil fuels and other sources.
