Climate Crisis Future

Will We Save the Future? (Part II)

The scientist who has probably produced the most dire prediction for the Climate Crisis future is James Lovelock, best known for his championing of the Gaia Hypothesis. His book, The Revenge of Gaia, looks at the interaction of phenomena that other scientists mostly study separately, and he sees the Earth inevitably changing because of greenhouse gases to a condition more like Mars--a barren desert, where fewer people than now populate the US may survive in a few isolated areas.

Bill McKibben, not a climate scientist but a writer thoroughly conversant with the science, and whose judgment I respect, describes Lovelock's position in the New York Review of Books:

He argues that because the earth is already struggling to keep itself cool, our extra increment of heat is particularly dangerous, and he predicts that we will soon see the confluence of several phenomena: the death of ocean algae in ever-warmer ocean waters, reducing the rate at which these small plants can remove carbon from the atmosphere; the death of tropical forests as a result of higher temperatures and the higher rates of evaporation they cause; sharp changes in the earth's "albedo," or reflectivity, as white ice that reflects sunlight back out into space is replaced with the absorptive blue of seawater or the dark green of high-latitude boreal forests; and the release of large amounts of methane, itself a greenhouse gas, held in ice crystals in the frozen north or beneath the sea.

As McKibben notes, not many scientists go this far, and Lovelock's book has not convinced many with its data or argument. Still, he does describe possible "feedback" and interrelated effects, that could happen. And as McKibben notes: Lovelock's flashes of insight about Gaia illuminate many of the interconnections between systems that more pedestrian scientists have slowly been trying to identify. Moreover, for the past twenty years, the period during which greenhouse science emerged, most of the effects of heating on the physical world have in fact been more dire than originally predicted.

McKibben doesn't dismiss Lovelock's intuitions about the interactions of Gaia. And when he turns to a climate scientist, a specialist with stronger data and a more solid reputation, NASA's James Hansen, he finds that Hansen says the world isn't doomed yet--we have "until 2015 to reverse the flow of carbon into the atmosphere before we cross a threshold and create a 'different planet.'" He doesn't say Mars, but it's close enough.

McKibben reviews several other, more hopeful books: on the rise of solar energy, on transformation in China and elsewhere in the world, and calls for political will as well as community involvement. But he also notes that the Climate Crisis is actually gaining speed, in the sense that its effects are being felt and observed sooner than expected, and its getting worse faster, as well as the increasingly faster rate our knowledge of what's happening is increasing.

And as a kind of addendum to the previous post about 1989, in a March New York Review piece, he notes that Hansen first warned about global heating's potentially catastrophic effects in 1988, but the words of arguably the foremost climate expert in the U.S. did not lead to quick action. McKibben interprets a section of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report as saying: if world leaders had heeded the early warnings of the first IPCC report, and by 2000 had done the very hard work to keep greenhouse gas emissions from growing any higher, the expected temperature increase would be half as much as is expected now.

He calls the IPCC report "remarkably conservative," yet it forecasts: if we don't take the most aggressive possible measures to curb fossil fuel emissions immediately, then we will see temperature increases of— at the best estimate—roughly five degrees Fahrenheit during this century. Technically speaking, that's enormous, enough to produce what James Hansen has called a "totally different planet," one much warmer than that known by any of our human ancestors.

The IPCC report does not take into full consideration the emerging study of the possible effects of melting polar ice, which is happening more rapidly than predicted--more rapidly than some scientists could even imagine. This melting is a good candidate for the tipping point factor--the phenomenon that interacts with others to send the planet on a self-reinforcing course of heating that nothing can stop.

We don't know that yet, and though we may have a much better idea about it in the near future, we probably won't be certain for decades. What we do know is that if we don't cut our current carbon emissions--the consensus is now that we need to cut them by 80% by 2050--we are likely to turn Earth into Mars.

There is more political movement to do so in the U.S. and in much of the world than ever before. But what if we don't? What will 2050 and subsequent years look like? If we act like we have for the last century or so, it will not be pretty.
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