I must explain to children why this is not a love song.
I teach a high school class on climate science. These are my thoughts as the semester gets underway. There is no uplifting message waiting at the end of this diary. I am just recording my present thoughts, clear-eyed.
Ultimately, I think our biology has failed us in two related ways. As individuals, we tend to make decisions based on our emotional responses then justify them with our intellect and this is not helpful when our science warns of future dire consequences that we cannot experience in the present. On a social level, we have succeeded evolutionarily by struggling against other groups of humans and have an instinctual predilection for cultural competition that does not serve us well in a world where we must come together as one people to preserve the global commons that makes civilization possible.
Before we get to the biology, let me set the stage.
Back in late 2002 and early 2003, several things were clear: the Bush administration was stoking jingoism with the run up to war in Iraq and an eye toward the 2004 election; the income and power gap between the richest Americans and the average family was continuing to increase beyond the point of obscenity; and scientists were reiterating the urgent need for dramatic build out of renewable energy networks in order to avoid runaway feedback loops in the climate system.
At the time, I wrote that the country was ripe for a populist movement and the big question was whether it would come from the political left or right. Would it be the people rising together to give the barons a haircut and begin to make the world’s energy systems sustainable, or would the right tap that resentment and bring people together by finding a new scapegoat?
We had a chance, I thought, with Howard Dean in 2003. His campaign was a movement fueled by people who came together using online organizing and fundraising tools effectively for the first time. From my perspective, it sure seemed that the leadership of the Democratic party spent a lot of money and effort to derail his campaign in the Iowa caucus, and after his voice cracked (the Dean Scream) during the post-caucus rally Dean was almost universally lampooned for days across network and cable broadcasts alike. Although the campaign was gut-shot and a comeback would have been miraculous, I drove down from Colorado to New Mexico to knock on doors and help out for a weekend a few weeks later.
The opportunity was lost, however. The party nominated John Kerry, a fine man but one who was unable to articulate a compelling vision of national unity, working together and sacrificing together, that we badly needed. Of course Kerry lost to Bush who began his second term.
It’s said that we campaign in poetry and govern in prose. Like Kerry before her, Hillary Clinton was a master of policy’s prose and would have made a perfectly competent president. Perhaps even a very good one. But then, as now, we did not need good. We needed dramatic, transformational changes both to the political power structures and – through that – to the global energy supply.
As anemic as the Paris Climate agreement of 2015 was, it was at least a step in the right direction and a framework to build on. There was a slim chance that a President Clinton would have continued to make the transformational progress we needed to wean our energy system off of fossil fuels in time to avert catastrophic changes. Now even that faint hope is gone as President-elect Trump has indicated his intention to withdraw from the Paris agreement and has nominated noted climate change skeptics Scott Pruitt to head the EPA and Myron Ebell to facilitate the EPA transition team.
I do not want to diminish the genuine reasonable and palpable fear that women, people of color, religious minorities and LBGTQ persons are experiencing and will in all probability continue to experience as this present tsunami of anger washes over us. It’s deeply disturbing and, unfortunately, quite likely to get worse as the intimidation gets normalized. These are truly terrifying prospects and they must be resisted. Nonetheless, there is reasonable hope that we can calm these waters in time, heal, and rebuild some of the trust that has been lost between us as a nation.
Geophysical processes are less forgiving, however. With any real progress on climate policy pretty much unimaginable from this government, it’s Game Over for civilization as we know it. I wish this were hyperbole. Tipping points now will surely pass – if they haven’t already – making the land a significant net source of greenhouse gases and driving unstoppable melting of the ice caps with its corresponding slow but inexorable and catastrophic sea level rise. Flooding. Dislocation. Drought. Famine. Failed states.
The problem, in then end, is that we humans act on what we feel, not on what we know. In a short but wide ranging presentation a few years ago, psychologist Dan Gilbert reviewed our responses to threats and lamented that climate change isn’t happening fast enough for us to take notice and respond with our inherited instincts. I think the talk is all of 12 minutes and, if you’ve read this far, you’ll find it worth your time.
What Gilbert doesn’t mention are the sharp edges of the blade. First, many climate effects are spatially irregular and temporally intermittent. By the time that consequences are sufficiently persistent and global to motivate enough people to collective action, many of the nation states that might once have been capable of negotiating and enforcing solutions will likely be severely stressed or already failing. The other sharp edge is that the climate system is huge and most of the short and medium term feedbacks are positive. Even if humans worldwide would dramatically curtail our greenhouse emissions, the gases already in the atmosphere would continue to warm the earth for centuries.
But this failure to foster globally collective action is another way in which our biological inheritance is failing us. As E.O. Wilson notes (see his Meaning of Human Existence), humans are one of the few species that has been subject to both individual and group selection pressures. We have a duality about us that makes us by turns both selfish and altruistic, and this legacy of group selection – in which one group displaces another from a favored habitat – makes it hard to see only us. In transcendent moments, a person may come to believe that “there is no them, there’s only us” (to quote U2), but that is not our normal perspective. Objectively, individuals over-rate the groups in their lives, they affiliate and esteem their communities irrationally. This aspect of human evolution leaves us susceptible to cliquishness and tribalism, distrust of outsiders. And there always seems to be someone outside to distrust, to work against. Furthermore, as individuals are put under more stress, their reactions become more instinctual; the cerebral cortex that does our reasoning and planning loses control to our lizard brain.
This passage from Carl Sagan’s The Demon-haunted World seems prescient:
I worry that… pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us – then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls. The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.
And indeed, this seems to be where we are. Trembling pools of light. Darkness gathering. And we know that the effects of climate change will continue to increase the stresses on both individuals and social systems.
By now it would have been a close run thing if we’d somehow managed to take drastic action. Maybe the window had already shut by the time of the Dean campaign. Or Gore. Recent studies suggest that feedback from soils – tundra soils in particular – is likely to equate to about 20% of anthropogenic greenhouse emissions over the next 30 years. Not to get too far into the weeds here, but this suggests that to stabilize the climate anthropogenic emissions will need to fall to something very like zero by 2050 in order to continue civilization as we’ve known it.
Maybe it was never possible to bring all of humanity along with the necessary changes anyway; I don’t see how we’ll ever know. It would have been nice to try, though, while we still had a chance.
So, looking ahead, it’s hard to see how we overcome our need for the other and work together with everyone around the world to make life harder for ourselves just as the consequences of a changing climate are stressing states and pushing people toward instinctive reactions, fear, and tribalism. I suppose I can hope I’m wrong, but the evidence strongly suggests that this long game of civilization is all but over. The only question is how long we individually want to stand back and watch the credits roll. Of course we will still have choices about how quickly it all collapses, but that’s pretty thin gruel, and – as hard as it would be to get people to sacrifice in order to save humanity – I cannot even imagine convincing people to sacrifice in order to merely delay the inevitable.
And here I’m reminded of the end of Rogue One (spoiler alert). The Death Star has used its lowest power setting and fired on the Imperial base that Jyn and Captain Andor have recently raided, destroying it utterly. The effect appears to be somewhat larger than a nuclear blast, but it starts at quite a distance from our characters and they have time to watch the wave of destruction come at them for perhaps a minute while they embrace. It’s clear to both the audience and the characters that they cannot possibly survive. And Jyn watches it come.
In the real world, though, we get to watch the wave come at us for years, decades, hell, perhaps even generations (if we’re lucky?) before all of this is gone: freedom of movement, our current coastal cities, abundance, trust between strangers, biodiversity, rational governments supported by educated citizens (to the extent we have them now). And not gone in one fell thermonuclear swoop, I should think, but in a series of disasters great and small, each of which will tear a little bit from the fabric of civilization, dissolving some of the trust and reciprocity on which we all depend.
As it is now, I think most people are unwilling to look too deeply into this void. It’s like what they say about dreaming of your own death; for many it’s simply inconceivable. And those who do look into the future, the seers of our time, are largely scientists with strongly developed prefrontal cortexes. Surely they have passions, but those passions are usually well-governed. These are not people who tend to start riots. But as the darkness of our future comes closer and more people recognize that the system is spiraling out of control, it will be that much harder to maintain cultural norms, to ensure the long term common good at the expense of individual sacrifice when there is effectively no Long Term worth sacrificing for. Yes, it can always get worse, but people are not likely to pay extra for catastrophe when Armageddon comes free with the Happy Meal. If this last election has shown us anything, it’s confirmed Frank Zappa’s line “People, we is not wrapped tight.”
So these are the thoughts that I cannot share with my students as we study climate science this semester. They may come to these realizations in their own time, but for now it is better that they understand the physical science and work toward taking action commensurate with their values. I suppose it’s still possible that some strong collective action could make a difference and get us on the right side of the feedback power curve, but I don’t see it. I have hope, but I believe it to be baseless; is that still hope? Nonetheless, taking action will certainly help the students feel better about the darkness they will have foreseen in the science. And it can’t hurt. But, damn, they’re children and I can only rob them of as much of their childhood as necessary to make them informed citizens on this the most important and most actively ignored challenge humanity has ever faced.
Or not faced.
