I'm taking a short break from my discussions of various economic matters to talk about -- well, an economic matter.
Submitted for your attention, an incredibly sobering article concerning the truth about climate change. It's worse than you think.
Yeah, I know where I'm posting. You guys already think it's bad.
It's worse.
Follow me below to get discouraged.
David Roberts has an article on Vox (linked above) that summarizes some of the political realities. It is still theoretically possible to avoid raising the average world temperature more than 2 degrees C – but to do so would require unprecedented and heroic action. Even with such action, it would be necessary to develop technologies that we don’t yet know are possible, let alone politically viable.
Given the technical and political realities (as contrasted with the theoretical physical possibilities), humans already are monumentally screwed. Climate science deniers like to pretend that the climate models are overestimating the effects of climate change. They’re not. They are stupendously underestimating the ongoing and future changes. The models include outrageously optimistic assumptions about the abilities of humans to slow their carbon emissions, or to create technologies that will pull carbon out of the atmosphere.
There is immense pressure to show it’s still possible to keep temperature rise under 2C, or even to prevent total systemic collapse. Anyone admitting the true difficulties runs the risk of being dismissed – politically – as being overly pessimistic, and having listeners turn away from such a downbeat assessment. There are places you can learn about the effects of temperature increases of up to about 10C. (I found one valuable article a while back, can't find it now -- If I can, I'll add in an update.) In truth, there seems no practical way to avoid increases on the order of 4C to 6C, even if theoretically it would be physically possible to do that.
A 4 to 6 C increase in average world temperature is catastrophic beyond anything humans have yet faced. It is a larger change than what led to the last ice age, but in the opposite direction. At this point, it seems unavoidable.
Climate modelers are being asked to produce models with optimistic assumptions – that is, models that show it is possible to keep temperature change within a range that would not produce nearly unimaginable systemic collapse. These, therefore, are the models they are producing.
If, worldwide, humans adopt enormously different energy production strategies, and create currently-unknown technologies – and do so now, turning on a dime – it may be possible to maintain some semblance of civilization. On the other end of the continuum, if we do nothing different from what we’ve been doing, then within only a few generations, civilization of any sort will become no longer viable. Earth will face a mass extinction on the scale of the Permian-Triassic event some 250 million years ago.
Between those extremes – between the unachievable and the unthinkable – there is a pretty wide range, but all of it is occupied by various levels of disaster on an incomprehensible scale. From Robert's article:
“The fact is, on our current trajectory, in the absence of substantial new climate policy, we are heading for up to 4°C and maybe higher by the end of the century. That will be, on any clear reading of the available evidence, catastrophic. We are headed for disaster — slowly, yes, but surely.”
Climate science deniers are rapidly graduating from
Stage 1 and Stage 2 (“It’s not happening” and “We’re not causing it”) to Stage 3 (“It’s not that bad”). This Stage won’t last long. It can’t, because the effects of climate change are too many and too obvious and too catastrophic (
collapsing ice sheets, increasingly
violent storms,
megadroughts, hellish
heat waves, oceanic
die-offs, loss of
fresh water, and so on), and these effects will rapidly worsen over the next few years.
The Fourth Stage of denial (“We can’t fix it”) is already here in some quarters, since the costs of taking action are escalating at an alarming rate. While it is theoretically possible to alter our course – that is, to do so doesn’t violate any of the known laws of physics – it would be politically impossible. Given the political realities and the overoptimistic assumptions baked into the climate mitigation models, we are already on the verge of the final Stage – “It’s too late.”
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.
Perhaps as long as a hundred years from now, more likely sooner, all of humanity will curse this generation. And we'll deserve it.