That chart was created by two Princeton University scientists, Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala, back in 2004 when they co-authored a paper in Science. The power of their interpretation — however simplifying — helped push forward the discussion of climate change into wider public circles.

Seven years later, Socolow has written an update to the analysis, reaffirming and intensifying the duo’s original message: that available-today technologies, including broadly-applied carbon capture and storage (CCS) have the capacity to reverse emissions growth. Socolow was stirred to re-visit his analysis because “[Our] core messages are as valid today as seven years ago, but they have not led to action”.

For CCS watchers, Socolow’s update is worth digging into for a couple of reasons. First, the exercise offers a grim reminder of how quickly the climate challenge is worsening. Where his 2004 estimate called for seven gigatonne-scale wedges of emissions reductions, Socolow’s update predicts we’ll need nine, if we started today, and it will take longer.

And, second, the muted response to Pacala’s ominous update is a worrying sign that the data is having less impact at a time when it should be attracting more attention. Pacala address why this is so, and how to respond.

To help illuminate both points, let me step back to review the content and context of the first paper. When the first wedges analysis was published in 2004, officials in the Bush White House were resisting climate change policy, making the argument that, even if the science is valid, there was no available technology to fix the problem.

Against this backdrop, the two Princeton scientists’ succinct paper, including the cannily clear ‘wedges’ analysis, made the case that, “humanity already possesses the fundamental scientific, technical and industrial know-how to solve the carbon and climate problem for the next half-century,” as Socolow recently recounted.

Here’s his description of their methodology:

“In a widely reproduced figure, we identified a ‘Stabilization Triangle,’ bounded by two 50-year paths. Along the upper path, the world ignores climate change for 50 years and the global emissions rate for greenhouse gases doubles. Along the lower path, with extremely hard work, the rate remains constant. We reported that starting along the flat emissions path in 2004 was consistent with ‘beating doubling,’ i.e., capping the atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) concentration at below twice its ‘pre-industrial’ concentration (the concentration a few centuries ago).

The paper is probably best known for having introduced the ‘stabilization wedges,’ a quantitative way to measure the level of effort associated with a mitigation strategy: a wedge of vehicle fuel efficiency, a wedge of wind power, and a wedge of avoided deforestation have the same effect on the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Filling the stabilization triangle required seven wedges.”

Among some 15 or so other wedges that Socolow and Pascala mapped out, three looked to CCS for reductions on the order of one gigatonne per year, to capture CO₂ at present and future plants generating baseload power plants, H2 and/or coal-to-synfuel.

To be sure, the graph had its critics. Charles Petit at the Knight Science Journalism Tracker reminds us why it was also so catalytic, so much so that it perhaps encouraged false hope about the ease of fixing this problem:

“It was oversimplified, but for goodness’s sake, that’s what your typical members of Congress and White House senior staffers require. Wedges, for a while, were the currency of climate mitigation conversation. Yet since then emissions have gone on shooting up. Some critics said the Princeton pair so simplified that task, however abstractly, that it got translated subconsciously as an easy job. And easy jobs don’t get emergency attention. Thus for mapping a route away from climate peril Socolow and co-author Pacala got pinned, by some, as a reason policy makers lost their fear and, without it, did hardly anything.”

(To wit, earlier this year, Socolow was drawn into a brouhaha when a blogger reported he actually regreted writing the first wedges paper. Socolow responded to the contrary immediately and repeatedly since, and does so again in this publication.)

The update, while more alarming, has made less of a splash. The formal publication of Wedges II, if you will, was published simultaneously in two sites: the formal research paper appeared as ‘Wedges Reaffirmed’, in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; a more shorter adaptation can be found at the Climate Central website.

Following both versions, there’s a fascinating trail of comments filed by high-level climate experts and global warming pundits such as the likes of Nicholas Stern (Chairman of the London School of Economics Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and member of the Global CCS Institute’s

International Advisory Panel), Natural Resource Defense Council’s director of climate programs David Hawkins, and even physicist Freeman Dyson, a climate change ‘heretic’.

Further afield, however, very few media outlets have paid attention to this update, as Petit points out. This is partly due, to be sure, to the recession and global anxiety, but it also reflects the ways in which climate messaging has backfired. Even Socolow, in the less formal write-up of his research at Climate Central, acknowledges that the first wave of climate analysis made mistakes:

“I submit, advocates for prompt action, of whom I am one, also bear responsibility for the poor quality of the discussion and the lack of momentum. Over the past seven years, I wish we had been more forthcoming with three messages: we should have conceded, prominently, that the news about climate change is unwelcome, that today’s climate science is incomplete, and that every ‘solution’ carries risk. I don’t know for sure that such candor would have produced a less polarized public discourse. But I bet it would have. Our audiences would have been reassured that we and they are on the same team – that we are not holding anything back and have the same hopes and fears.”

It is not too late to bring these messages forward.

He concludes with an assessment that many in this carbon policy and energy fields have likewise come to — that changing public opinion about climate policy will take more than science: “To motivate prompt action today, seven years later, our wedges paper needs supplements: insights from psychology and history about how unwelcome news is received, probing reports about the limitations of current climate science, and sober assessments of unsafe braking”.

Important as his revised analysis of the ‘wedges’ is, Socolow’s ruminations on the challenge of how to frame and communicate about the solutions is sage advice to help guide thinking about the CCS policy agenda as well.

Additional resources related to the stabilization wedges are available online at Princeton University.

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