Earth System Dynamics www.earth-syst-dynam.net 2190-4979 2190-4987 3 1 2012 10.5194/esd-3-1-2012 http://www.earth-syst-dynam.net/3/1/2012/ http://www.earth-syst-dynam.net/3/1/2012/esd-3-1-2012.html http://www.earth-syst-dynam.net/3/1/2012/esd-3-1-2012.pdf 1 17 2012-01-05 No way out? The double-bind in seeking global prosperity alongside mitigated climate change T. J. Garrett tim.garrett@utah.edu Department of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA In a prior study (Garrett, 2011), I introduced a simple economic growth model designed to be consistent with general thermodynamic laws. Unlike traditional economic models, civilization is viewed only as a well-mixed global whole with no distinction made between individual nations, economic sectors, labor, or capital investments. At the model core is a hypothesis that the global economy's current rate of primary energy consumption is tied through a constant to a very general representation of its historically accumulated wealth. Observations support this hypothesis, and indicate that the constant's value is λ = 9.7 ± 0.3 milliwatts per 1990 US dollar. It is this link that allows for treatment of seemingly complex economic systems as simple physical systems. Here, this growth model is coupled to a linear formulation for the evolution of globally well-mixed atmospheric CO₂ concentrations. While very simple, the coupled model provides faithful multi-decadal hindcasts of trajectories in gross world product (GWP) and CO₂. Extending the model to the future, the model suggests that the well-known IPCC SRES scenarios substantially underestimate how much CO₂ levels will rise for a given level of future economic prosperity. For one, global CO₂ emission rates cannot be decoupled from wealth through efficiency gains. 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