“It’s worse, much worse than you think.”
You know that you are going to be in for an uplifting time when this is the introductory line in the book that you are reading. But I didn’t buy, “The Uninhabitable Earth – Life After Warming” to be cheered up. I wanted to read it to shake myself out of complacency. I think everyone should read this book, because I want its ideas and message to get out to as many people as possible. But, in lieu of that, I want to help disseminate what I find important in the book along with my thoughts, to you, in diary form.
Part I: Cascades
This is the introduction to the book where David Wallace-Wells lays out what is currently happening to the Earth because of climate change, how much worse it can get, and how and why we should fight.
Wallace-Wells begins by highlighting the fact that many of the things that we tell ourselves about climate change to rationalize our inaction are myths or delusions. The climate is changing faster than we have anticipated and planned for. And we are accelerating that change.
Wallace –Wells points out that of the past 5 mass extinction events on our planet, one was caused by an asteroid(s), the others all involved climate change caused by greenhouse gases. Think about that, mass extinctions of 75-96% of all life on the planet dying off because of, in part, climate change.
Ian, uh, Malcolm
I see another diary posted today by ClimateDenierRoundup about how the planet is not fragile, but about how life on the planet is. Forgive me, but I recently listened to the Jurassic Park audiobook, and while Michael Crichton was a famous climate change denier, one of the characters in the book, Dr. Ian Malcolm goes off on a rant about how human meddling in nature won’t destroy the planet, just the people on it. The planet has been here for billions of years and will be here for billions more. Life has existed on earth long before humans arrived on the scene and life will continue on long after we are all gone. Life will find a way. Will humanity?
Climate change will make things more difficult for us, all of us. In 2011, the Syrian Civil War,
Syrian Refugees. Credit to Reuters.
something that was exacerbated by climate change in the Persian Gulf, caused approximately 1 million
Syrian refugees to flee to Europe. This influx of refugees destabilized the continent and we are still dealing with the consequences: the rise of xenophobia and right-wing nationalism.
If the global temperature continues to increase at the rate it is currently increasing, refugees from Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and South Asia could number approximately 140 million by World Bank estimates potentially upwards of 200 million by low-end U.N. projections by the year 2050. The upper end of the UN projections is 1 billion refugees. How will the developed nations of the world handle 100-200 million climate refugees? A billion? 1/7 of the global population on the move to find safety and security. How will that change our governments and our societies?
Nationalists marching in Sweden to protest/terrorize Syrian refugees. Credit Glyko Salmoritis
Wallace-Wells doesn’t think that the reality will be as dire as those predictions, but warns that the projections are still a possibility. One that is now thinkable because of the changes occurring in our environment.
In 1997, the nations of the world met and signed the Kyoto Protocol. In that agreement, the nations agreed that a 2 degree Celsius rise in global temperatures would be the “threshold of catastrophe.” Global temperatures have risen slightly more than 1 degree already. It is now almost unthinkable that we will avoid 2 degrees of warming. The Kyoto Protocol was a failure.
It wasn’t just the US that tanked Kyoto, but we don’t have a good track record when it comes to climate change.
Despite the Kyoto protocol, we, as a species, have produced more greenhouse gases in the twenty years since the Kyoto Protocol than in the twenty years prior. In fact, the 2016 Paris Accords established 2 degrees of warming as the goal that we should limit ourselves to. That’s sobering. What was once considered to be catastrophic warming in 1997 was considered to be the best case scenario twenty years later in 2016.
If all of the Paris agreement commitments were implemented today, warming would probably stop at 3.2 degrees Celsius. *Edit/Correction* At this point only 7 nations signed on to the Paris agreement are on track to meet the 2 degree goal: Bhutan, Costa Rica, Ethiopia, India, the Phillipines, Morocco, and The Gambia. *End of Edit/Correction*
And new research into the history of Earth suggests that we may be underestimating the amount of warming that could happen. It is possible that if every country started to meet its Paris commitments that the planet could still see global temperatures rise by more than 4 degrees.
One researcher estimates that if global temperatures rise from 1.5 degrees to 2.0 degrees, that 150 million more people will die because of air pollution. The Intergovernrnental Panel of Climate Change agrees, but with larger numbers, estimating that hundreds of millions of lives are at risk.
Even stopping warming at 2 degrees would potentially cause the collapse of all of the Earth’s ice sheets flooding a hundred cities around the globe, Miami, Shanghai, Hong Kong.
At our current estimates, if we stop putting carbon into the atmosphere and reach equilibrium at 500 parts per million, we will stop at about 2 degrees of warming.
The last time Earth’s atmosphere had 500 ppm carbon dioxide was 16 million years ago and the seas were about 130 feet higher than they are today. Wallace-Wells points out that 130 feet of sea level rise would mean that the ocean might reach as far inland as I-95 on America’s east coast.
At 4-5 degrees of warming large portions of the planet would be rendered uninhabitable to humans as we know them today.
These changes would be essentially irreversible. Permanent polar ice is not just going to reform. It will take potentially thousands of years.
And frankly, we don’t know how much carbon dioxide we are going to put into the atmosphere and precisely how much warming will result. There is approximately a 10% chance that we get to more than 6 degrees of warming. There is a 1/3 chance that we exceed 5 degrees of warming. All by 2100.
Even if the Earth show resistance to warming as much as predicted, we could still have warming of 4-5 degrees if in 80 years if we continue to act as we do today.
Even now we are seeing the results of climate change. Forest fires burning hotter, longer, and larger than before. More powerful hurricanes. Deadly heat waves. We have turned the planet into a weapon that nature is using against us. And we are making that weapon more powerful and destructive every day.
And these events are not isolated. Nature is a system that feeds on itself. For example: the climate warms up, warmer temperatures cause trees to fail to thrive, they dry up and burn in forest fires. The decreased plant population decreases nature’s ability to absorb carbon dioxide leading to more warming.
Speaks for itself
These feedback loops can be local, regional, or global. The effects cascade, one after the other, in a loop of climate devastation. These effects start with the natural and can lead into the social. As we saw with the Syrian refugee crisis, as climate change renders certain areas of the world less habitable, people living there become stressed and migrate, en masse to better, safer areas. Most of the countries most vulnerable to climate change are poorer countries which are less able to adapt. This massive migration leads to stresses on the countries taking in the migrants. This migration leads to, at least in the instant case, the empowerment of rightwing/conservative groups/ideologies that historically don’t care about environmental issues. Additionally, the change in these political circumstances has the effect of paralyzing these countries and their policy making abilities as they are focused on dealing with a refugee crisis. As resources become scarce, the public starts to trust governmental institution less leading to governmental paralysis or disintegration.
This sounds hysterical, Wallace-Wells says but “the facts are hysterical.” This is what we are working with. And while we may have been trained to be passive in the face of looming disaster, “Someone else who is smarter and more powerful than me will take care of it,” global warming is a man-made phenomenon and we all share responsibility for writing the next act of humanity.
Despite these dire warnings and predictions, Wallace-Wells is optimistic about humanity and its chances. We have the power to determine our own destinies and we won’t get there by burying our heads in the sand. We should be clear-eyed about what is coming and see what we can do to
prevent the worst from happening. Already there are technologies that can mitigate the harm we are causing: cleaner means of producing energy, carbon capture, and even geo-engineering if it came to that. There are also technologies yet to be discovered. The future has not yet been written, but we need to act now, rather than succumb to climate fatalism.
Our own individual choices can make an impact, but that impact pales in comparison to the impact that collective and political action can make. We should strive to mold society in ways to mitigate the damage that we are causing to the globe.
Wallace-Wells wants us to be open-eyed about the serious, dangerous changes that we are causing in our own world. Bad things are happening and they will only get worse, to the point of global catastrophe if we continue without change. We can only know how to change but acknowledging the horrific fate that awaits us and our descendants if we don’t. But there are reasons to hope. Humans have faced near extinction before, and we are still here. We can master our future, but time has already started to run out.