I grew up on a steady diet of classic Sci-Fi short fiction. Asimov, Bradbury, Ellison, Heinlein, Le Guin — these names were the landmarks on my literary terrain. I loved the compact stories, the simple (and sometimes not simple at all) moral questions, philosophical musings, and powerful visions (both optimistic and fearful) of what might lay ahead.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about one in particular. Lately, the simple yet devastating moral truth that lay wrapped in prose at the center of that story seem to speak to me more and more. I find myself looking at our world now and thinking about hard choices in the face of the inescapable . . . the central theme of Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations”.
Read on . . .
Published in 1954 in Astounding Magazine, “The Cold Equations” centers on an Emergency Dispatch Ship transporting critical supplies to a distant colony. The pilot, Barton, is the sole crew member. Because of the distances the ship must cross, everything — life support, fuel — is critical, and there is zero margin for error. Everything is pared down to the minimum, right down to the line, so Barton can reach his destination.
And then . . . Barton finds a stowaway. An 18-year-old girl, Marilyn, has stowed away to see her brother at the colony She doesn’t know about razor-thin tolerances, or weight limits, or life support capacities. She doesn’t know, until Barton explains it to her, that her presence on the ship dooms them both, and dooms the colonists depending on Barton’s supplies. The only solution — and the one mandated by law — is that she must be jettisoned so the mission can succeed.
The story has been called “good physics but lousy engineering”. It would be insane to sent a ship across deep space without margins for error — fairly wide ones — and redundancies on top of redundancies. The science, in this particular bit of science fiction, is hoaky. But practical realism wasn’t the point — it was the notion of facing hard truth and taking hard action, because the numbers don’t change no matter how much you ask them to. Physics does not give you partial credit for trying, and does not give anyone a pass because they’re personally blameless. Math don’t lie, and sometimes the truth hurts.
I’ve been thinking about that because math is telling us something now, something we don’t want to hear. Physics and chemistry have some hard truths for us — and while we (thankfully) don’t have to send a young girl out an airlock, there are plenty of oxen that need goring.
It’s a bit of a coin flip as to whether a 2-degree Celsius rise in global temperature by mid-century is now inevitable. Even with the Paris accords, there may be just too much carbon in the atmosphere — and too much still being pumped in daily — to stave off that kind of increase. The math — just like in Godwin’s story — is what it is.
For perspective: the last time global temperatures were that high, sea levels were sitting around 18-20 feet higher than they are right now. by the time the melting made inevitable by a 2 degree increase finished — and it could happen faster than we think. maybe just a little more than a century — any coastal city you can name would have had to be abandoned. Half of mankind will have to relocate to higher ground. And with sea levels that high, a lot of major aquifers will have irreversible sea water intrusion — the costs on the human side of that alone are staggering; the ecological impacts are unimaginable. And those wouldn’t be the only water supplies in danger - the combination of temperature increase and changes in precipitation patterns would also devastate those communities that rely on glacial or snowpack runoff (California, as a case in point).
Agriculture would face a seismic shift, as established growing zones and seasons will be null and void. Many cultivated crops may survive in new locales, but it’s unlikely all will be able to adapt - or that human societies will be nimble enough to find new niches for them all. Famines will be widespread.
Two degrees is bad, and — like I said — may or may not already be inevitable. But what if we don’t act? Then we could be looking at a locked-in change of 3 degrees Celsius. At that point, various feedback loops are escalating the rate of warming. The carbon cycle we learned in school is thrown into a jumble. Sea levels will rise, inescapably, to about 80 feet higher than they are now. The death of the Amazon — and its 10% of the world’s total photosynthetic output — is a foregone conclusion. Even mountains may be destabilized — many are stabilized in part by permafrost above 10,000 feet, and there won’t be anymore of that. Agriculture will be in a shambles. The human death toll will be in the millions — the high millions.
Four degrees is a picture so dismal I don’t even want to describe it. Agriculture is essentially finished, at least on the scale needed to maintain large populations. Even more feedback loops are activated, accelerating change even more. This is a different world, entirely, from the one we know. The odds of any current government surviving in a stable form are basically nil.
Where we end up on that list of horrors depends on what we do right now — and I mean right now. The odds of avoiding 2 degrees of warming rely on a 60% reduction of greenhouse gases in the next decade — a Herculean effort. But it’s essential, because even counting only the feedback loops we know, there are good odds that reaching each one of these benchmarks makes the next inevitable due to cascading effects. Add in a few that are certain to surprise us, and it becomes all the more critical that we stop this as fast as we can.
We are talking about wholly rebuilding society, and doing so within a decade or two. We’re talking about changing how we travel, how we eat, how we live, and doing it fast. We’re talking about radical change.
And even beyond that, we’re talking about preparations to handle the effects that are already inevitable — flood mitigation, support and a process of some kind of transition for areas where warming has already changed agriculture or the availability of water. We’re going to have to deal with current economic impacts, unavoidable future impacts and the rapid cultural transformation that will staunch the global bleeding.
Physics does not give partial credit, as I said. It is not going to grade us on a curve of what’s “politically feasible” or “reasonable”. The mechanics of climate are not going to self-mitigate to save jobs or industries. The math is not going conform our standard of living. The Cold Equations are what they are.
Whoever the next President is, they have to make the hard choices, very hard choices, to stave off an existential threat. They will have to do that in the face of political opposition. They have will have to push through a general public that doesn't either understand or accept the severity of the problem — or just doesn’t care as long as they live out their own lives in the lifestyle to which they’ve become accustomed. The next President will have to gore many oxen.
Nothing else matters in this election, honestly. Not the Supreme Court, not income inequality, not abortion rights. All those things, all the other elements of a Progressive legacy, survive only when there’s a stable society to transmit them. If we don’t address the math of climate change — if we don't commit to solving the Cold Equations - there will not be.