The Ice Age Cometh
Well, not so fast. A coming ice age is a central denier argument. It’s based on natural phenomena and if not for the massive quantities of greenhouse gases humanity has pumped into the atmosphere, we would be entering a cooling phase. However an actual ice age would require thousands of years to take effect.
Meanwhile what’s happening now is that it’s now been 415 consecutive months that the global temperature has been above the 20th century average and the last 5 years, including 2019 which is certain to be near the top, have been the hottest on record.
If you take a look at this chart which tracks temperature and CO2 over the last 350,000 years, three things stand out.
The first is that the two move in tandem, in lockstep, they are inextricably tied together.
When you point that out to a denier, they want to argue about which came first. While it would be interesting to understand the underlying physics, for our purposes that really doesn’t matter. It’s only pertinent that they move together.
The second is that most of those 350,000 years were much colder than today and the warm periods were brief. It’s easy then to postulate that we’re headed for an ice age until you look at the extreme spike in CO2 at the end of the graph. How is it possible after hundreds of thousands of years of tracking very closely that we’d enter a cooling phase alongside skyrocketing CO2? CO2 up, temp down? Makes no sense.
The other thing to note about the spike is that it’s far steeper than the previous spikes, though they look sharp enough, they still involve thousands of years. The reason why the temperature hasn’t matched the rise in CO2 is the effect of the oceans as a heat sink. It takes much longer for water to heat up so there’s an inherent delay before it catches up. Meanwhile we’ve only warmed by 1°C, though this last July, which was the hottest month on record was up an impressive 1.2C, so we’ve essentially already cached a lot more heat for release later. As you can infer from the chart, the current level of 410ppm CO2 corresponds to a least a couple more degrees of warming.
Up to this date, humanity has produced about 2000 gigatons of CO2: if we want to stay below 1.5°C of warming we can only burn another 500 gigatons. In order to do that we have to halve our emissions by 2030 and in order to do that we have to have plans in place in just 18 months.
For the Green New Deal to be effective it has to be on the level of America’s mobilization for the Second World War. A monumental effort, in other words. Since the US produces about a quarter of all greenhouse gases, the GND would have a massive impact, but it also would inspire others to do the same as well as requiring the US and other developed countries dig deep to provide the funding to help the developing world do their part.
Meanwhile producers of fossil fuels are spending monumental amounts of money locating and developing additional sources. And many governments are promoting and building new coal fired power plants. Will the forces of sanity overcome the juggernaut of profit in time? Stay tuned, it won’t take long to find out.