I mean the concepts that are needed just to understand the Crisis itself. This isn't simply a matter of observing a threatening situation and putting a stop to the danger. Though global heating is present and operating right now, the greatest threats that could be produced are in the future. They must be anticipated as well as observed.
In the past, we might know when a bad situation might get worse, and might lead to utter catastrophe. That was the impetus for stopping Hitler for many people. But even that took a long time to sink in. This time we have to take several more conceptual steps to grasp what the future might bring.
To understand this crisis involves concepts that we haven't had to apply to past crises. There's the concept of "feedback," when effects combine to reinforce causes, and create bigger problems. Like heat waves caused partly by the CO2 in the atmosphere, that dry soil so that they release more CO2, which feeds back to create more heat waves, which dries more soil, which... But it's more than reinforcing; the phenomenon gets bigger. Heat waves last longer, become droughts; winter starts later and ends sooner, hot weather insects have longer to spread disease, and so on.
Or the melting of Arctic ice, as one scientist described it: "What we're seeing is a process in which we start to lose ice cover during the summer," he said, "so areas which formerly had ice are now open water, which is dark. "These dark areas absorb a lot of the Sun's energy, much more than the ice; and what happens then is that the oceans start to warm up, and it becomes very difficult for ice to form during the following autumn and winter. It looks like this is exactly what we're seeing - a positive feedback effect, a 'tipping-point'."
And there's another of those concepts: when some processes--usually very large ones--get going, and feedback starts and continues, until the point of no return, the tipping point is reached, after which the process continues until it is completed, or until an opposite feedback effect can very slowly reverse it. The new IPCC reports are talking about feedback that's already ongoing, and tipping points that have already been passed, meaning that some processes are going to continue for at least a thousand years.
The greatest Climate Crisis danger we face is that global heating and the resulting feedback effects push some very large processes, like the melting of all the major ice reservoirs, past their tipping point, which would mean such an extreme change in climate that it's doubtful human civilization could survive, not to mention planetary life as we know it.
To understand feedback and the tipping point--both concepts concerning the behavior of systems, or systems dynamics--is crucial to understanding why preventing the conditions that get them started is so important. But there is another concept that is especially important right now, if we're going to get the next 30 years right, let alone the farther future.
That concept is lag time, or the time-lag. This is not a crisis we can fix by doing something and then things quickly return to normal. The cause of the Climate Crisis was and is cumulative over time. What's done to cause it occurs decades before the effect.
And ending the crisis, changing the effect, is not a matter of slowly subtracting the stuff that caused it. Because once the effect is caused, it takes on a life of its own. So the first factor is lag-time: the time between the cause and effect. In this case, the lag time is measured in decades.
Mark Hertsgaard explained this well a couple of years ago:
"At the core of the global warming dilemma is a fact neither side of the debate likes to talk about: It is already too late to prevent global warming and the climate change it sets off.
Environmentalists won't say this for fear of sounding alarmist or defeatist. Politicians won't say it because then they'd have to do something about it. The world's top climate scientists have been sending this message, however, with increasing urgency for many years. "
By now, some of the effects of global heating are becoming obvious--it's here, no matter how we'd like to deny it. But Hertsgaard's point still hasn't quite sunk in. He writes:
The problem is that Kyoto governs only future emissions. No matter how well the protocol works, it will have no effect on past emissions, which are what have made global warming unavoidable. Contrary to the impression given by some news reports, global warming is not like a light switch that can be turned off if we simply stop burning so much oil, coal and gas. There is a lag effect of about 50 to 100 years. That's how long carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas, remains in the atmosphere after it is emitted from auto tailpipes, home furnaces and industrial smokestacks. So even if humanity stopped burning fossil fuels tomorrow, the planet would continue warming for decades. "
He concludes:
Until now, most public discussion about global warming has focused on how to prevent it -- for example, by implementing the Kyoto Protocol... But prevention is no longer a sufficient option. No matter how many "green" cars and solar panels Kyoto eventually calls into existence, the hard fact is that a certain amount of global warming is inevitable.
The world community therefore must make a strategic shift. It must expand its response to global warming to emphasize both long-term and short-term protection. Rising sea levels and more weather-related disasters will be a fact of life on this planet for decades to come, and we have to get ready for them. "But that strategic shift hasn't yet been made, partly because the deniers are still trying to cast doubt on the basic premise of global heating caused by greenhouse gas emission with catastrophic long-range consequences if continued, and so everyone else is still trying to refute their denial. But delaying the realization is dangerous: the Climate Crisis is two crises. And if we don't understand this, and if we don't act simultaneously on both crises in the next 30 years, there may well be no continuous human future on planet Earth.
I say that because the lag time of what's already going to happen because of past greenhouse gas emissions and their effects is estimated to be from 30 to 50 years for the processes that might decline and eventually stop in the next century or so, if we do what's necessary to stop it.
In other words, most of what's being talked about now to address the Climate Crisis--reversing the growth of greenhouse gas emissions through individual, corporate and government action, and instituting clean energy--won't make any difference for the next 30 years, apart from social, cultural, economic and health changes not directly related to climate changes.
We're talking almost exclusively about what I call the Stop It strategies--efforts that are necessary to save the future, not the present or the next 30 years. But sometime soon, almost certainly in the next five years, that's going to change. When devastating phenomena--deadly heat waves, droughts, floods, hurricanes, epidemics, famine--finally get recognized as being caused by global climate shifts, then the hue and cry will be to Fix It --and fix it now.
There are already preliminary tremors, noted here on this blog in August: a debate between Fix It and Stop It advocates. Sterling Burnett, of a conservative "free market" think tank, wants to concentrate on the Fix It crisis: like building seawalls on threatened coasts and innoculating people in Africa who are in greater danger of malaria because of the spread of mosquitos in the regions getting hotter. Environmentalist Drake Hamilton wants to concentrate on the Stop It crisis: reduce greenhouse gases by 60% by 2050 to "protect against the most dangerous consequences" farther in the future, which according to scientists could include the end of civilization and a planet scoured of most life as we know it.
The answer is obvious: we must Fix It and Stop It simultaneously. But don't underestimate the difficulty of conceiving that commitment and the courage that will be necessary to insist on it. First of all, Burnett is likely not the last business-oriented conservative who will drop the global heating denials and insist that we devote all our efforts to fixing the effects of past emissions. There is a lot of power in that position, and a lot of money to be made by companies and their powerful lobbyists. The same fear tactics that got Halliburton all those contracts in Iraq can do the same for that company and others.
The temptation to drop long-term efforts will be given additional strength when those efforts to cut fossil fuel emissions and to develop and use clean energy, all of which may entail sacrifices, lifestyle changes, economic dislocations and stress, aren't paying off in any obvious ways. In other words, what happens when we've cut emissions way back, and the climate keeps getting hotter, the droughts, hurricanes, diseases, etc. continue? And people are desperate and dying?
What happens when the cry arises to forget that useless activity, power up the generators and get to work on fixing the crises of the present? Does the future lose? If society doesn't understand the lag time involved in the Climate Crisis, and the need to simultaneously work to Fix It now and Stop It for the future , then one or the other is going to lose, and lose big.
Consider how difficult it's been, how long it is taking, just to accept the need to address the Climate Crisis at all. And we've hardly begun doing anything more than arguing. (There's substantial innovation, of course, and that may pay off very fast with the right leadership.) Consider how easy it's been to panic the American public by invoking 9-11. Consider that we're still fighting over Darwin vs. the Bible. And most of all, consider how our politics, our media and our way of thinking is all predicated on either/or choices. The leap to "both" is even more necessary than it is to understand the concepts of lag time, feedback and the tipping point, although a general public understanding of those concepts can go a long way to getting us to both Fix It now and Stop It for the future.
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