The Climate Future

Following up on some recent posts about climate and the future, as well as the reading that prompted these posts, I've formed a kind of working future history--a kind of outline, that provides a time-framework for thinking about things to come.

This is based on informed speculation but it is also a first attempt, and subject to revision, perhaps early and often. But at the moment it seems realistic to me. Basically it divides the future into three phases:

1. Now to circa 2035: Climate Crisis
During this period, the evidence for human-caused climate disruption increases, as does the evidence for ongoing effects of past greenhouse gas pollution. Awareness and acceptance also grows, but for the rest of the current decade at least, much of the public will (for one reason or another) fail to connect the dots, and Climate Crisis denial will reach a fevered pitch.

However, a minority that recognizes at least part of the crisis will be very active, though in different pursuits. Some will recognize that immediate and long-lasting change is necessary to keep the Climate Crisis from becoming the ultimate catastrophe in the next century. Some will recognize the imminent danger of effects now inevitable in the near future due to past greenhouse gas pollution. A smaller number will realize both. But everyone will choose specific areas in which to concentrate their own efforts.

Some will concentrate on alternative energy, and on developing technologies to deal with effects. Some will try to figure out how to deal with the effects when they become dominant, and the entire society has no choice but to change. Some will work on political change, or try to increase public awareness and acceptance. But due in part to the violence of the denialists, I suspect many will work as quietly as possible to be ready for future changes.

Those changes will probably at first be unrelated responses to specific catastrophes, threats and emergencies. Eventually, the role of climate in these accumulating problems will be accepted. Perhaps that will lead to conscious strategies, and the work of those who were preparing may then see the light of day.

So the tasks of the Climate Crisis period will be: develop and institute the changes necessary to drastically cut greenhouse gases so runaway climate collapse doesn't happen in the far future, while preparing to deal with the effects of inevitable climate cataclysm already beginning, and becoming dominant in...

2035 to 2090: Climate Cataclysm.
Scientists estimate that it takes about thirty years for greenhouse gas pollution sent into the atmosphere to have direct effect on the planet. So the gases now being produced will have impact on climate in 2040. By the same token, the changes in climate today are largely the result of the lesser amounts of pollution that entered the atmosphere in 1980, as well as the cumulative effects of some greenhouse gas pollution prior to that.

And that's what's apparently got scientists and other careful observers really worried. According to their pretty reliable models, the polar ice melts observed in real time now, shouldn't be happening for many years. Which suggests that things are worse than they thought, and are likely to keep getting worse than that for the forseeable future.

Even within the relatively conservative estimates of the most recent UN climate report, the near future is going to have serious problems. A Brooking Institutions report published in 2008 looked at possible consequences of the three climate scenarios (which might be classified as bad, worse and worse yet)--the volume is titled Climatic Cataclysm.

But data since that UN report, particularly the sea ice melts, suggest to some (such as David Orr in Down to the Wire) that the effects are going to be a lot worse: sea level rises wiping out coastal cities, storms, heat and drought, diseases, possibly resource wars, large-scale human migrations, and all the attendant problems of multiple disasters. Futurist and s/f writer Bruce Sterling has been warning for years that the effects will be so extensive that virtually everyone's lives in this future will be completely dominated by climate change.

The dates I selected are a matter of splitting the difference between estimates various scientists have made informally (as for example, here) on when climate cataclysm effects will become undeniable. Some say ten years, some say thirty, and of course, no one knows.

But we are already getting hints as to what the near future may be like. Just in the past month or so, the world has experienced destructive earthquakes in Haiti, Japan and Chile, with significant quakes elsewhere. At the same time as emergencies in Haiti and Chile are ongoing, there have been several record snowstorms disabling the big cities of the North American East Coast and U.S. Middle Atlantic, and killer storms in Europe. Some of these events are climate-related, others perhaps not, but the point is: these are large and complex crises, affecting millions of people, requiring lots of resources and attention, while disrupting normal economic and other activities. As the number and extent of such crises increase, their effects accumulate.

This is partly why Orr and others have adopted Jim Kunstler 's term, the Long Emergency. A lot of small emergencies become one. And also because, once the climate heats up and feedback effects set in, feedback will extend to the social and political effects. It won't be a matter of meeting an emergency and going back to normal. There won't be a normal, or not for long. It's likely to be one Long Emergency, always changing.

It is possible that changes will be made in the interim to make coping with this period not as traumatic: more flexibility from decentralized renewable clean energy, a quicker and more general awakening to what's really happening that motivates societies and maybe even the world to act quickly and consciously. It's possible. Some seeds are being planted in our Climate Crisis era.

On the other hand, we don't really know what will happen when the dominoes start to fall. Already our biodiversity is dwindling fast, and we don't know at what point the web of life that supports us will shatter.

The tasks of the Climate Cataclysm period will be to cope with the effects in real time, as well as resisting the temptation to abandon efforts to end greenhouse gas emissions, even though the climate has clearly changed. Because, if those efforts aren't successful...

2090-12090: Climate Collapse

There's no avoiding the Climate Cataclysm years. We've made that bed. But it may still be possible to avoid the ultimate apocalypse of Climate Collapse--otherwise known as runaway climate change. This would result in a planet so hot that human civilization and perhaps human life will be unlikely, except maybe for a small fraction of today's population. It would be a planet so hot that most animal and plant species on the planet today will be extinguished. This would happen over a century, maybe two, maybe even three. But it will last for hundreds of thousands of years. I made it just one hundred thousand, because I'm so lame at math.

But I repeat: the difference isn't between the climate we have now and Climate Collapse. The climate we have now will very likely be history in the Climate Cataclysm period, and it will not return to this state for at least thousands of years.

So all the efforts to reduce carbon emissions, create a global cap-and-trade market, etc., all the meetings and treaties like Kyoto and Copenhagen and upcoming in Mexico City--they are all bascially about preventing Climate Collapse. Not everybody knows that, or thinks so, but that's the probability, as far as I can tell.

And we don't really know how much time we have to get this done, except that it's probably not very much time, and it may in fact be too late, because we don't really know what effects are going to show up in the next 30 years: basically, how things will interact or create feedback loops, so the effects of global heating accelerate more heating. Scientists like James Hansen have developed what they think is the upper limit, and while we haven't yet reached it, if we keep going as we are now, we soon will.

When I started considering all this, especially as I was reading the Orr book and seeing related conclusions popping up, I was of course pretty shocked. I thought I'd accepted that there were going to be inevitable effects in the near future. I just didn't realize they would be so severe, and especially would last so long. We're changing this planet to something we wouldn't recognize, probably forever! That's incredibly awful, and hard to face with anything but numb despair.

Maybe it's that psychological predisposition to concentrate on the practical aspects and even on the positive elements, once you've accepted that catastrophe is inevitable. But I've found there is plenty to consider and think about, and especially plenty to do, both to prepare for the Climate Cataclysm near future, and to continue trying to forestall the Climate Collapse of the far future. And that's what I'll be writing about, in the very near future.