The worst-case climate change scenario is making its way across the Internet this week in a highly shared article published in New York Magazine by David Wallace-Wells. The pushback and angst it has sparked among the science community seems to be as relevant as the dismal future he predicts:
It is, I promise, worse than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today. And yet the swelling seas — and the cities they will drown — have so dominated the picture of global warming, and so overwhelmed our capacity for climate panic, that they have occluded our perception of other threats, many much closer at hand. Rising oceans are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the coastline will not be enough.
In a jarring analysis that purports to confirm what many of us have suspected as we’ve watched the seasons we once grew up with become increasingly unpredictable, as populations of wild animals disappear or migrate to places they should never be, as crops refuse to grow in places where they should, and as fish and coral reefs die off and vanish without explanation, Wallace-Wells is telling us—yes, we’re killing our planet and our children’s futures with our unchecked consumption of fossil fuels. Yes, it’s happening faster than anyone predicted. And yes, your children—or at best, your grandchildren for the most part—are going to suffer miserably, no matter how rich or protected you think they are.
The Uninhabitable Earth is his title:
[A]bsent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century.
It’s really not possible to do justice to the total impact of Wallace-Wells’ article, which unsparingly rolls together all of the likely consequences of an unstoppably warming planet into one, horrifying piece—the unbreathable air that ravages the lungs of millions, the perpetual wars for a drastically diminished food supply, the end of ocean life as we know it and the spread of disease on a scale we can’t fathom.
And then, there’s the weather:
In a six-degree-warmer world, the Earth’s ecosystem will boil with so many natural disasters that we will just start calling them “weather”: a constant swarm of out-of-control typhoons and tornadoes and floods and droughts, the planet assaulted regularly with climate events that not so long ago destroyed whole civilizations. The strongest hurricanes will come more often, and we’ll have to invent new categories with which to describe them; tornadoes will grow longer and wider and strike much more frequently, and hail rocks will quadruple in size. Humans used to watch the weather to prophesy the future; going forward, we will see in its wrath the vengeance of the past.
Wells doesn’t introduce a “novel” analysis as much as he extrapolates from the fact that the scientists, in pursuit of accuracy, tend to mediate their estimates of the potential consequences of climate change. He simply takes their scenarios to what is (for him at least) their logical conclusion. And he draws out what they appear to ignore, often because the science is not yet refined enough to provide accurate models. One of the biggest “unknowns” he takes on is the impact of warming on vast permafrost reaches in places like Siberia:
Until recently, permafrost was not a major concern of climate scientists, because, as the name suggests, it was soil that stayed permanently frozen. But Arctic permafrost contains 1.8 trillion tons of carbon, more than twice as much as is currently suspended in the Earth’s atmosphere. When it thaws and is released, that carbon may evaporate as methane, which is 34 times as powerful a greenhouse-gas warming blanket as carbon dioxide when judged on the timescale of a century; when judged on the timescale of two decades, it is 86 times as powerful. In other words, we have, trapped in Arctic permafrost, twice as much carbon as is currently wrecking the atmosphere of the planet, all of it scheduled to be released at a date that keeps getting moved up, partially in the form of a gas that multiplies its warming power 86 times over.
But while the impact of unchecked warming on Arctic permafrost is surely a cause for concern, it is a concern that hasn’t yet been wholly validated by climate research. This is why it's not the fossil fuel industry that is taking pains to try to refute Wallace-Wells’ worst-case projections, but the scientific community and those who write about climate issues on their behalf.
Robinson Meyer, writing for The Atlantic, acknowledges that many of Wallace-Wells’ arguments are valid, at least in theory, but says he’s ignoring the potential countermeasures such as the growth of renewable energies already beginning to appear that could moot his doomsday scenario.
On the other hand, a strategy for addressing climate change is coming together. The cost of solar and wind energy are plunging worldwide; carmakers are promising to take more of their fleet electric, and the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere from human activity has stabilized over the past three years. Decarbonizing will be an arduous and difficult global project—but technological development and government policy are finally bringing it into the realm of the possible.
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[Wallace-Wells’ scenario is] a scary vision—which is okay, because climate change is scary. It is also an unusually specific and severe depiction of what global warming will do to the planet. And though Wallace-Wells makes it clear that he’s not predicting the future, only trying to spin out the consequences of the best available science today, it’s fair to ask: Is it realistic? Will this heat-wracked doomsday come to pass?
Meyer makes the case that Wallace-Wells’ catastrophic vision is unproven, is not necessarily supported and in some cases contradicted by existing research, and therefore may not come to pass. Other reputable voices in the climate science community, such as Michael Mann, have been even more forceful in their denunciations of the article.
Meyer also acknowledges that the Trump Administration is actively and intentionally undermining not only the environment but our ability to understand the catastrophic potential of climate change in ways that have yet to be felt, through its anti-environmental, pro oil and coal policies. He contends, however (and many scientists agree) that a message wholly based on deep pessimism and hopelessness—which is what Wallace-Wells' article certainly conveys, is ultimately counterproductive and may even exacerbate the problem by prompting people to do nothing out of sheer despair.
And yet certain things are simply undeniable, as Wallace-Wells points out:
The Earth has experienced five mass extinctions before the one we are living through now, each so complete a slate-wiping of the evolutionary record it functioned as a resetting of the planetary clock, and many climate scientists will tell you they are the best analog for the ecological future we are diving headlong into. Unless you are a teenager, you probably read in your high-school textbooks that these extinctions were the result of asteroids. In fact, all but the one that killed the dinosaurs were caused by climate change produced by greenhouse gas. The most notorious was 252 million years ago; it began when carbon warmed the planet by five degrees, accelerated when that warming triggered the release of methane in the Arctic, and ended with 97 percent of all life on Earth dead. We are currently adding carbon to the atmosphere at a considerably faster rate; by most estimates, at least ten times faster.
One of Wallace-Wells most effective arguments, also left unrefuted by Meyer, is that despite all of this evidence staring us in the face, Americans at least don’t appear to have grasped the implications of what is happening to them. You’d think that seeing a string of 70 days where the North Pole effectively melts away would have made an impression, but it didn’t. That crack in the Antarctic ice shelf that grew 11 miles in six days? Where was that on the evening news? Nowhere. Americans for the most part are pre-occupied with one thing right now—the ever-changing antics of a clown known as Donald Trump.
This is where the well-intended criticism of Wallace-Wells seems to break down. It seems to ignore the elephant in the room—that we’re arguing about whether potential extinction of the human race in an astonishingly short period of time is something too depressing, “counterproductive" or de-motivating to talk about, or whether such predictions should be be “refined” or "corrected" with more precise, further analysis, say, about the potential release of methane from the permafrost.
I’m sorry, but I think the time for that has passed.
Because the climate change that threatens us all is caused by people, specifically the collective decisions of people who have the power to influence its course, like the successive string of CEOs for Exxon, who knew about the existence of man-made climate change as early as 1977, but deliberately financed efforts to sow doubts about in in order to enrich themselves at our expense. And it’s due to the rest of us, driving our SUVs from coast to coast and feasting on the oil companies’ cheap largesse by turning up our air conditioners.
Despite all these efforts to mitigate the impact of climate change, tens of millions of Americans thought it wise to elevate people like Trump and his cadre of anti-science fanatics bent on hurling us towards oblivion to a position where he could actually endanger the planet. Few, if any of them, considered the impact of their vote on the future of the environment. In fact, the richest nations in the world have had the benefit of science proving the existence of climate change for over four decades. With some notable exceptions they’ve managed to create a booming, fossil fuel-fed consumer market for their citizens, one extremely attractive to nations climbing their way out of poverty. What exactly, other than catastrophe, is going to motivate those countries to sacrifice their own interests? Who is going to lead that charge? It’s certainly not going to be the United States, from all appearances.
Meanwhile, the planet proceeds to warm, while a fossil-fuel financed denial industry pours billions of dollars into manufacturing a “debate" about even the existence of something that is plainly before us. The same industry is now actively fighting the spread of renewable energies such as solar power, with legislation barring incentives for solar already in several states. And as evidenced by the continual shifting of the target goals by even such well-meaning organizations as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the possibility of reversing the damage caused by man-made climate change is slowly dwindling to vain hope, the same kind of “just barely enough” hope that keeps prisoners from hanging themselves with their twisted bedsheets when they’re on their last days of death row:
[N]o matter how well-informed you are, you are surely not alarmed enough. Over the past decades, our culture has gone apocalyptic with zombie movies and Mad Max dystopias, perhaps the collective result of displaced climate anxiety, and yet when it comes to contemplating real-world warming dangers, we suffer from an incredible failure of imagination.
And that’s the thing. People like Donald Trump, Scott Pruitt and the current members of the Republican Party are going to be long dead, their brittle yellow teeth grinning out of their desiccated skulls at the catastrophe they helped to bring about. Some of them doubtlessly knew what they were doing when they condemned future generations to a hothouse environment like what Wallace-Wells projects. But for the millions who supported them, who enabled them and permitted them to do what they did, planetary warming was just something they didn’t want to think about.
Until it was too late.