In August 2015, a bunch of scientists submitted a comment to Nature Climate Change about the need to consider the effects of climate change far into the future — much farther than the usual projections to 2100 or so. Here’s the tl;dr of that article: The effects of current carbon emissions, including atmospheric CO2 levels, global warming, and sea level rise, will be felt for at least 10 000 years. However, the size of these effects depends strongly on how much we emit right now, so the decisions we make globally over the next few decades are enormously consequential.
There have been a bunch of articles and think pieces in response to this. The Guardian posted one with a headline about sea level rise lasting “twice as long as human history.” David Roberts at Vox wrote one to muse about the long-term impacts of the upcoming US presidential election as well as the way we discount the future in our present decisions. Both of these are well worth a read, especially if you’d rather not slog through the academic article.
All this talk about millennia-long effects and civilization-defining decisions has made me want to pull back and contemplate what is really going on at this moment in history. Why is our decision making so out of touch with the consequences of our actions? Will we ever be able to act on our knowledge of such long term processes intentionally and rationally?
I’ve got an idea of how to think about this: The systems that underlie human decision making are in the midst of a jump in their evolution. Up to now, societies and political structures have coordinated human efforts across shorter spans of time, on the order of generations. Recently we have begun to understand much longer time spans with more accuracy, but we have not yet developed the systems needed to use this understanding effectively. The onset of climate change is one of the growing pains of human evolution, and addressing this challenge will make or break our potential to organize ourselves over even longer stretches of time.
Follow me below the fold as I attempt to flesh out this idea. Please let me know what you think in the comments!
To start, it’s worth mentioning that this idea is partly inspired by my training in physics. When looking for solutions to problems ranging from atoms to planets, it pays to think about questions in terms of what the relevant scale is in its variables. Asking, “What’s the relevant energy/time/length scale for this interaction?” helps to sort out important factors from unimportant ones, and can reveal similarities among seemingly unrelated phenomena. If I use the idea of time scales to paint some broad strokes over human history, I see a trend that helps me to make sense of the moment we find ourselves in.
Let’s start with how we understand the world around us. The invention of language extended the range of human understanding from a single lifetime to multiple generations. Stories change over time when repeated from memory, though, so the amount of time one could understand accurately was still limited. Written communication was another leap forward, because the words on the page didn’t change. Improvements in writing, from the printing press to the world wide web, made this more durable method available to more people, and provided more opportunities to cross check stories and zero in what’s real. The result is that at this point in our history, we understand the previous five thousand years unimaginably better than humans from then understood the millenia before them. All this comes in addition to the innovation of methods to unravel aspects of the past from evidence such as sediment, tree rings, and ice cores. The story of human adaptation is in many ways tied to our ability to peer further into the past and build a clearer and more accurate picture of it.
Now how have we used our knowledge to make decisions? The spoken word gave rise to traditions that helped societies adapt to their environments, and eventually build from small tribes into larger cities. Writing allowed for the creation of laws and codes, which helped to structure human in ways that endured for centuries at a time. Eventually, our ability to communicate even allowed us to dispose of the need to have individual leaders making the big decisions for a society, and we began innovating representative governments that endure based not on family lines but on agreements recorded in documents, such as constitutions. Embedded in these systems are incentives tied to the rhythm of election cycles and the careers of professional politicians. Though we can understand vast stretches of time, our decisions are made in ways that often emphasize the present.
Climate change throws a stark contrast on these timescales, posing a unique challenge to our systems for making decisions. We have been burning fossil fuels at an unchecked rate for a couple centuries, most of it in the last half century; these fuels took millions to hundreds of millions of years to form. We enjoy the energy output over minutes of smartphone use and years of industrial food output; each bit of CO2 burned to give us these commodities only comes out of the atmosphere on timescales of decades to centuries. Somehow, we need incentives that tie the decisions we make right now to these impacts that stretch orders of magnitude beyond the span of any single human life.
Where should we look for solutions to this problem? It's tempting to throw up our hands in despair, because no human institution up to this point in private enterprise or public service has managed to coordinate an effort this vast. There is a flaw in looking to the past for solutions, however. Human systems don't exist to address this problem, because before now human systems never interacted with these scales. Mass media, peer-reviewed science journals, and democratically elected governments have only been around a tiny fraction of the time scales involved. Looking at that another way, human institutions are capable of adapting much more quickly than the climate system. I'm convinced that the right way to look at this crisis is that the systems and institutions that will solve the long term problems of climate change haven't been invented yet.
While this is a reason to stay hopeful, we should still take the warning in the above mentioned paper very seriously. After all, if we develop the perfect way to respond to global crises after our emissions commit us to melting the ice sheets and flooding out coastal communities, that’s not much of a victory. Our ability to innovate quickly enough to avoid catastrophe is directly tied to our ability to forecast these long term trends based on data we have now. Adaptation is a process of trying new things and then choosing the ideas that show the most success based on some kind of feedback. If we wait for the climate system to give us tangible feedback in the form of flooded cities or destroyed ecosystems, that process of adaptation will happen too slowly to prevent long lasting change. If we trust our instruments and the experts that interpret them, and if we use that data to determine which of our ideas work best, then we will prevent the worst from happening and emerge even more capable in our role as a global species.
The uncertainty of the future still leaves plenty of room for hope. The solutions to climate change are still being invented, and despair does not encourage creativity, so we need to keep that hope in sight. We must also pay attention to what scientists say the data is telling us, and we should speak out to our leaders and to our peers so that awareness of these issues can lead to better decisions. If we meet this challenge well, the brightest days for humanity are still ahead of us.