About seven years ago I wrote a series of posts on the subject of climate change under the heading of “An Inconvenient Truth“. It seems to me that this is a good time to provide an update and review some of the topics that currently dominate the news. In Part Seven I wrote the following:
“The “inconvenient” truth about climate change is that the earth is dying. It is losing its ability to support life. Insects are dying. Trees and plants are dying. Birds and animals are dying. How long before our agriculture and crop yields are seriously affected? How much time do we ourselves have left?
“This truth is inescapable. It is no longer something that we can merely shrug off as inconsequential. Not only is it a truth that none of us can avoid, but it is one that every one of us must come to terms with as we make the day-to-day decisions about the future conduct of our lives.
“Unfortunately, the reality is that very few people today are equipped to handle the devastating truth that the world as we know it is coming to an end. They simply cannot bring themselves to believe that the entire human species could be threatened with extinction.
“Yet the evidence is there for all to see. And it is growing more and more evident with every passing year. We are reminded of the movie “A Few Good Men”, in which the actor Jack Nicholson uttered that memorable line, “You can’t handle the truth!”.
“The ultimate question is: Can you? ”
At the time I wrote this piece, not only were most people unaware of the seriousness of the problem, but they tended to dismiss this as just another example of “fake news”, or at best an exaggeration of something that was of little concern to the general public.
So even I was surprised to read an Opinion piece by the noted climate scientist and best selling author Bill McGuire that appeared on CNN on March 7, 2024, that began with the words: “I’m a climate scientist. If you knew what I know, you’d be terrified too”. He then went on to say:
“Are you frightened by climate change? Do you worry about what sort of world we are bequeathing to our children and grandchildren? In the words of science writer and author of “The Uninhabitable Earth” David Wallace-Wells, “No matter how well informed you are, you are surely not alarmed enough.”
“I would put it even more strongly.
“If the fracturing of our once stable climate doesn’t terrify you, then you don’t fully understand it. The reality is that, as far as we know, and in the natural course of events, our world has never — in its entire history — heated up as rapidly as it is doing now. Nor have greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere ever seen such a precipitous hike.
“Think about that for a moment. We’re experiencing, in our lifetimes, a heating episode that is probably unique in the last 4.6 billion years.
“While those of us working in the climate science field know the true picture, and understand the implications for our world, most others do not. And this is a problem — a big one. After all, we can’t act effectively to tackle a crisis if we don’t know its full depth and extent.
“What’s happening to our world scares the hell out of me, but if I shout the brutal, unvarnished truth from the rooftops, will this really galvanize you and others into fighting for the planet and your children’s futures? Or will it leave you frozen like a rabbit in headlights, convinced that all is lost? It is an absolutely critical question.
“Climate change is no different. Everyone has the right to know the facts — scary or not — so as to provide the opportunity to act based upon the reality of what we are doing to our planet, and not on some sanitized version”.
In his essay “The Uninhabitable Earth”, Wallace-Wells outlined a variety of conditions which threaten the continued survival of humanity on this planet. He divided these threats into nine categories:
1. “Doomsday”
It is, I promise, worse than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today.
And yet the swelling seas — and the cities they will drown — have so dominated the picture of global warming, and so overwhelmed our capacity for climate panic, that they have occluded our perception of other threats, many much closer at hand. Rising oceans are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the coastline will not be enough.
Indeed, absent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century.
2. Heat Death
Humans, like all mammals, are heat engines; surviving means having to continually cool off, like panting dogs. For that, the temperature needs to be low enough for the air to act as a kind of refrigerant, drawing heat off the skin so the engine can keep pumping.
At seven degrees of warming, that would become impossible for large portions of the planet’s equatorial band, and especially the tropics, where humidity adds to the problem; in the jungles of Costa Rica, for instance, where humidity routinely tops 90 percent, simply moving around outside when it’s over 105 degrees Fahrenheit would be lethal.
At 11 or 12 degrees of warming, more than half the world’s population, as distributed today, would die of direct heat. And the effect would be fast: Within a few hours, a human body would be cooked to death from both inside and out.
3. The End of Food
Climates differ and plants vary, but the basic rule for staple cereal crops grown at optimal temperature is that for every degree of warming, yields decline by 10 percent. Some estimates run as high as 15 or even 17 percent.
Which means that if the planet is five degrees warmer at the end of the century, we may have as many as 50 percent more people to feed and 50 percent less grain to give them. And proteins are worse: It takes 16 calories of grain to produce just a single calorie of hamburger meat, butchered from a cow that spent its life polluting the climate with methane farts.
Drought might be an even bigger problem than heat, with some of the world’s most arable land turning quickly to desert. By 2080, without dramatic reductions in emissions, southern Europe will be in permanent extreme drought, much worse than the American dust bowl ever was.
The same will be true in Iraq and Syria and much of the rest of the Middle East; some of the most densely populated parts of Australia, Africa, and South America; and the breadbasket regions of China. None of these places, which today supply much of the world’s food, will be reliable sources of any.
4. Climate Plagues
Rock, in the right spot, is a record of planetary history, eras as long as millions of years flattened by the forces of geological time into strata with amplitudes of just inches, or just an inch, or even less.
Ice works that way, too, as a climate ledger, but it is also frozen history, some of which can be reanimated when unfrozen. There are now, trapped in Arctic ice, diseases that have not circulated in the air for millions of years — in some cases, since before humans were around to encounter them.
Which means our immune systems would have no idea how to fight back when those prehistoric plagues emerge from the ice. The Arctic also stores terrifying bugs from more recent times.
In Alaska, already, researchers have discovered remnants of the 1918 flu that infected as many as 500 million and killed as many as 100 million — about 5 percent of the world’s population and almost six times as many as had died in the world war for which the pandemic served as a kind of gruesome capstone.
5. Unbreathable Air
Our lungs need oxygen, but that is only a fraction of what we breathe. The fraction of carbon dioxide is growing: It just crossed 400 parts per million, and high-end estimates extrapolating from current trends suggest it will hit 1,000 ppm by 2100. At that concentration, compared to the air we breathe now, human cognitive ability declines by 21 percent.
Other stuff in the hotter air is even scarier, with small increases in pollution capable of shortening life spans by ten years. The warmer the planet gets, the more ozone forms, and by mid-century, Americans will likely suffer a 70 percent increase in unhealthy ozone smog, the National Center for Atmospheric Research has projected.
By 2090, as many as 2 billion people globally will be breathing air above the WHO “safe” level; one paper last month showed that, among other effects, a pregnant mother’s exposure to ozone raises the child’s risk of autism (as much as tenfold, combined with other environmental factors). Which does make you think again about the autism epidemic in West Hollywood.
Already, more than 10,000 people die each day from the small particles emitted from fossil-fuel burning; each year, 339,000 people die from wildfire smoke, in part because climate change has extended forest-fire season (in the U.S., it’s increased by 78 days since 1970).
By 2050, according to the U.S. Forest Service, wildfires will be twice as destructive as they are today; in some places, the area burned could grow fivefold.
6. Perpetual War
This is one reason that, as nearly every climate scientist I spoke to pointed out, the U.S. military is obsessed with climate change: The drowning of all American Naval bases by sea-level rise is trouble enough, but being the world’s policeman is quite a bit harder when the crime rate doubles.
Some speculate that the elevated level of strife across the Middle East over the past generation reflects the pressures of global warming — a hypothesis all the more cruel considering that warming began accelerating when the industrialized world extracted and then burned the region’s oil.
What accounts for the relationship between climate and conflict? Some of it comes down to agriculture and economics; a lot has to do with forced migration, already at a record high, with at least 65 million displaced people wandering the planet right now.
But there is also the simple fact of individual irritability. Heat increases municipal crime rates, and swearing on social media, and the likelihood that a major-league pitcher, coming to the mound after his teammate has been hit by a pitch, will hit an opposing batter in retaliation.
And the arrival of air-conditioning in the developed world, in the middle of the past century, did little to solve the problem of the summer crime wave.
7. Permanent Economic Collapse
The murmuring mantra of global neoliberalism, which prevailed between the end of the Cold War and the onset of the Great Recession, is that economic growth would save us from anything and everything.
But in the aftermath of the 2008 crash, a growing number of historians studying what they call “fossil capitalism” have begun to suggest that the entire history of swift economic growth, which began somewhat suddenly in the 18th century, is not the result of innovation or trade or the dynamics of global capitalism but simply our discovery of fossil fuels and all their raw power — a onetime injection of new “value” into a system that had previously been characterized by global subsistence living.
Before fossil fuels, nobody lived better than their parents or grandparents or ancestors from 500 years before, except in the immediate aftermath of a great plague like the Black Death, which allowed the lucky survivors to gobble up the resources liberated by mass graves.
After we’ve burned all the fossil fuels, these scholars suggest, perhaps we will return to a “steady state” global economy. Of course, that onetime injection has a devastating long-term cost: climate change.
The scale of that economic devastation is hard to comprehend, but you can start by imagining what the world would look like today with an economy half as big, which would produce only half as much value, generating only half as much to offer the workers of the world.
8. Poisoned Oceans
That the sea will become a killer is a given. Barring a radical reduction of emissions, we will see at least four feet of sea-level rise and possibly ten by the end of the century.
A third of the world’s major cities are on the coast, not to mention its power plants, ports, navy bases, farmlands, fisheries, river deltas, marshlands, and rice-paddy empires, and even those above ten feet will flood much more easily, and much more regularly, if the water gets that high.
At least 600 million people live within ten meters of sea level today.
But the drowning of those homelands is just the start. You have probably heard of “coral bleaching” — that is, coral dying — which is very bad news, because reefs support as much as a quarter of all marine life and supply food for half a billion people.
Ocean acidification will fry fish populations directly, too, though scientists aren’t yet sure how to predict the effects on the stuff we haul out of the ocean to eat; they do know that in acid waters, oysters and mussels will struggle to grow their shells, and that when the pH of human blood drops as much as the oceans’ pH has over the past generation, it induces seizures, comas, and sudden death.
That isn’t all that ocean acidification can do. Carbon absorption can initiate a feedback loop in which under oxygenated waters breed different kinds of microbes that turn the water still more “anoxic,” first in deep ocean “dead zones,” then gradually up toward the surface. There, the small fish die out, unable to breathe, which means oxygen-eating bacteria thrive, and the feedback loop doubles back.
This process, in which dead zones grow like cancers, choking off marine life and wiping out fisheries, is already quite advanced in parts of the Gulf of Mexico and just off Namibia, where hydrogen sulfide is bubbling out of the sea along a thousand-mile stretch of land known as the “Skeleton Coast.”
Hydrogen sulfide is also the thing that finally did us in that time 97 percent of all life on Earth died, once all the feedback loops had been triggered and the circulating jet streams of a warmed ocean ground to a halt — it’s the planet’s preferred gas for a natural holocaust.
Gradually, the ocean’s dead zones spread, killing off marine species that had dominated the oceans for hundreds of millions of years, and the gas the inert waters gave off into the atmosphere poisoned everything on land. Plants, too. It was millions of years before the oceans recovered.
9. The Great Filter
It is not easy to know how much to be reassured by that bleak certainty, and how much to wonder whether it is another form of delusion; for global warming to work as parable, of course, someone needs to survive to tell the story.
The scientists know that to even meet the Paris goals, by 2050, carbon emissions from energy and industry, which are still rising, will have to fall by half each decade; emissions from land use (deforestation, cow farts, etc.) will have to zero out; and we will need to have invented technologies to extract, annually, twice as much carbon from the atmosphere as the entire planet’s plants now do.
Nevertheless, by and large, the scientists have an enormous confidence in the ingenuity of humans — a confidence perhaps bolstered by their appreciation for climate change, which is, after all, a human invention, too.
They point to the Apollo project, the hole in the ozone we patched in the 1980s, the passing of the fear of mutually assured destruction. Now we’ve found a way to engineer our own doomsday, and surely we will find a way to engineer our way out of it, one way or another.
The planet is not used to being provoked like this, and climate systems designed to give feedback over centuries or millennia prevent us — even those who may be watching closely — from fully imagining the damage done already to the planet. But when we do truly see the world we’ve made, they say, we will also find a way to make it livable. For them, the alternative is simply unimaginable.
Conclusion
While David Wallace-Wells is undoubtedly correct in his assessment of the long term effects of climate-change upon the planet, he is completely mistaken in his understanding of the true causes of global warming, which he attributes to carbon emissions from energy and industry.
For starters, climate change is NOT human-caused.
If it was, we would have seen a marked reduction in greenhouse gases in 2020 during the Covid pandemic due to the fact that most people were required to work from home, while others, as in the case of China, were simply prevented from travelling at all. However, no such dip was evident.
That means that we cannot reverse global-warming, no matter how much we reduce the greenhouse gases we release into the air. Even if we reduced this to zero, the earth would still continue to get hotter.
As I pointed out in Part Seven the simple truth is that the earth is getting hotter because the sun is getting hotter, and the earth is being bathed in ever-increasing amounts of deadly Ultra-Violet radiation.
And why is the sun getting hotter? The answer, sadly, is that we really do not know. As the anonymous source that responded to the New York investigative journalist Marjorie Tietjen that I quoted in Part Four responded:
“We don’t know exactly the cause of the phenomenon we are fighting. We don’t know how long it will last or the peak of its intensity. We only know that the Earth, as well as all the other planets and our sun, has become enveloped in an unknown energy field that threatens all stability across the solar system and our very lives”.
Allan, An Inconvenient Truth, Signs of the Times, March 13, 2024, 2:09 pm
This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 13th, 2024 at 2:09 pm and is filed under An Inconvenient Truth, Signs of the Times.
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