If you missed David Roberts's disturbing, depressing piece Friday at Vox, it's more than worth a look. It's essential reading. Roberts, until recently one of the mainstays of the award-winning online environmental magazine Grist, has written
the awful truth about climate change no one wants to admit:
The obvious truth about global warming is this: barring miracles, humanity is in for some awful shit.
Barring miracles. Roberts lays it out with graphs and an lengthy exploration of the soft-pedaling of climate change even by the people who know best that that action must be taken now, not tomorrow or in 2030:
Holding temperature down under 2°C—the widely agreed upon target— would require an utterly unprecedented level of global mobilization and coordination, sustained over decades. There's no sign of that happening, or reason to think it's plausible anytime soon. And so, awful shit it is.
Nobody wants to say that. Why not? It might seem obvious—no one wants to hear it! — but there's a bit more to it than that. We'll return to the question in a minute, but first let's look at how this unsatisfying debate plays out in public. [...]
The latest contretemps was sparked by a comment in Nature by Oliver Geden, an analyst at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. In it, he made a simple argument. Politicians, he says, want good news. They want to hear that it is still possible to limit temperature to 2°C. Even more, they want to hear that they can do so while avoiding aggressive emission cuts in the near-term—say, until they're out of office.
More on this below the fold.
Geden, Roberts writes, argues that scientists are "baking" unrealistically optimistic conclusions into their climate change models. One means of doing that is to take the view that we—humanity, that is—will after mid-century be able to go into negative emissions. That is, we will have the capability of sucking gigatons of CO2 out of the atmosphere, reversing the process that has brought on the climate crisis. If that's the case, then doing something aggressive and immediate about our emissions is not necessary. If that's the case, continuing an "all of the above" energy policy for now is entirely sensible. Not that scientists are making a pollyanna-ish, go-slow case themselves. But their baked-in optimism makes it easier for politicians and those who pull their strings to keep delaying action.
Water flows through a moulin
on the Greenland Ice Sheet.
There is no consensus and thus much dispute in the scientific community about whether this sucking up of CO
2 in gargantuan amounts is even possible. But one thing isn't in dispute: We don't yet have the technique to do it.
Basing current policy on uncertain future technology may seem like a good idea to some people. But not to realists. Dealing with climate isn't the same as building an Apple Watch.
In a post on Roberts's piece this morning, OutOnALimb notes that the dystopian world depicted in the latest Mad Max film now in theaters is "too upbeat":
It’s time to stop thinking and talking about the strategies for keeping the world under 2C. That isn’t going to happen. It is time instead to be more honest about the effects of a four to ten degree increase in average world temperatures, to scare the crap out of humanity, because that is the path we are on. We need to think about that world – how we will adjust to what we can’t change, and how we can bring about the changes we can make.
The problem is—the collapse of human civilization will happen to our grandchildren, or perhaps to theirs. Though it will get worse during our lifetimes, we'll be able to convince ourselves that humans can survive what we're doing. And we'll be able to keep our lives pretty much as they are, convincing ourselves that each one of the ever-more-frequent disasters was the only (or the last) such horror we're likely to live long enough to see. Meanwhile, the bus we're driving has already fallen over the cliff.
I don't think there's anything to disagree with in that first paragraph. As for the second, I'm not ready to throw in the towel. Even though I won't be around to hear them, I don't want my grandchildren to curse us for our unwillingness to stop fooling ourselves and our reluctance to force the political and economic changes that are needed to reduce the impact of global warming.
We can't wait. In World War II, the Axis Powers presented the planet with an unprecedented crisis. The nation responded by borrowing money from ourselves, retooling our industry, rationing goods and producing what was needed to defeat the fascists and Nazis. Today, we face a worse crisis. As Neil deGrasse Tyson noted a year ago: “The dinosaurs never saw that asteroid coming. What’s our excuse?”
We can see what's coming. Even with an aggressive reaction, it will be grim. Consequently, we can either throw up our hands in despair and choose to follow the biblical advice of "eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die," or we can choose to take on the deniers and delayers at every turn, in the streets and at the polls. No more excuses, for them or us.