Climate Crisis and Climate Catastrophe

What a few were saying is now becoming a stronger message: there are two distinct (if overlapping) parts to the climate future: there's the Climate Crisis we are now in, and must deal with, and there is the unimaginable future of an unrecognizable Earth, if we continue to feed the furnaces of global heating. (I've been calling it Earth=Venus, or Earth=Mars, but perhaps I need to come up with a better image, because people seem to get hung up on the technicalities. Then again, the current European space mission to Venus may make the image more pertinent.)

But it is still a confusing message, at least as it is reported. Last week, Professor Sir David King of the British government forecast a temperature rise of 3C over the next century if the world continues on its current C02 course. The BBC story quoted a report by Hadley Centre projecting the likely effects of a 3C rise." It warned the situation could wreck half the world's wildlife reserves, destroy major forest systems, and put 400 million more people at risk of hunger. "

The story quoted King as counselling against fatalism and despondency, but calling for urgent action to save the future. At the same time, it quoted him as saying that even if a global agreement could be reached on limiting emissions, climate change was inevitable.

This is true, but news style made the message seem contradictory. It's not.

Probably the best short piece I've seen recently is here at World Changing by Alex Steffen. He applauds the recent burst of awareness on global heating, like the Vanity Fair cover, which features celebrities bringing attention to the issue, something I have long advocated. But he finds that given today's knowledge, the so-called solutions are inadequate.

Except for one thing: the solutions. By and large, the solutions being offered by many of these newly-minted climate allies are quite simply out of whack with the magnitude of the crisis we face. Take the Vanity Fair green issue, in which associate editor Heather Halberstadt offers this prescription for action: "Turn off the faucet while you're brushing your teeth or recycle your Sunday newspaper. Little things can have an impact on a global scale; it doesn't necessarily mean buying a hybrid vehicle."

A few years ago, he writes, this would have been trite, but now, given the latest knowledge about how fast global heating is happening, it's just silly. It's way not enough.

Indeed, in study after study, model after model, what we are learning is that our society is not a little out of alignment with sustainability, it is massively and nearly completely unsustainable.
With an increasingly well-documented and articulated global ecological crisis on our hands, turning off the faucet and recycling the newspaper (while fine things to do) are pretty meaningless. The 21st Century does demand that we buy hybrids -- indeed, it demands much more: it demands that we imagine, build and buy cars which ecologically make hybrids look like hummers. It demands a complete redesign of our industrial civilization, from the chemicals we use to the energy we create to the cities we design to the way we deal with water and waste to the buildings in which we live. We are way, way beyond tinkering at the margins here.

We have maybe ten, maybe twenty years to do this. But we will be helping the far future, not our future. Steffen makes this clear, in a paragraph we should all be required to memorize:

We cannot "stop global warming" at this point. We are committed to a certain degree of climate disruption already. What we can do is stave off the truly catastrophic levels of climate change which will be our fate if we do not act. Unfortunately, there is a ridiculously large disconnect between what we must do to reduce our climate footprint and what we have so far been willing to even discuss.

Maybe we'd be better off calling these two situations The Climate Crisis (the near-term effects of global heating we must deal with, like crisis level prepardedness for hurricanes) and The Climate Catastrophe of the far future, which we can lessen or stop by serious action.

As for how we can make those tremendous changes, the clean little truth is that the knowledge to do so is out there, or much of it is. And some people, even some countries, are taking action. Did you know, for instance, that 80% of the cars in Brazil run on ethanol made from sugar cane?

The potential for biofuels is just beginning to be explored, and right now people are eagerly trying them out, because gasoline prices are so high, as is the expense of getting rid of "waste" like cooking oil, which can run an ordinary truck or car, with a bio-converter that often pays for itself in savings. Paul Solman had an eye-opening report on this on the PBS News Hour.

That's just one area of promise. I don't believe we really know, for example, the real potential for solar power and other clean technologies, even at the current state of development. Perhaps examples like Brazil and concerted efforts by many individuals, some major corporations, some cities and states, can get things started. But we truly need to mobilize, to understand the stakes, and see this as our adventure. With leadership and a widespread bedrock citizen commitment, there is hope.