Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

I've recently finished reading David Wallace-Wells' book The Uninhabitable Earth. It is a sobering, terrifying, and absolutely essential book. It also offers a potent counter to the many lies that we hear and tell ourselves about global warming.



Lie Number 1: This is an issue about prior and future generations.

More than half of all greenhouse gasses released into the atmosphere have been released since 1990. Some changes and warming are already unavoidable. But, if we do not make radical reductions in human emissions by 2050, the damage will be catastrophic and irreversible.

The vast majority of greenhouse admissions have happened and will continue to happen during our lifetimes. Most of it has occurred since we became aware of the dangers of global warming. And it will continue to compound indefinitely. If we do not act then we will condemn all of humanity for every future generation. That sounds like a ridiculous exaggeration. It isn't one.

We, the people alive today, have the only chance to address this problem.



Lie Number 2: It won't be that bad. "Nature lovers" might care, but humanity will be fine.

We are already beginning to see the effects of a warming world: more hurricanes, more wildfires, flooding, heat waves, etc... This is the very beginning. It will continue and it will continue to get worse. As the temperatures rise, year after year, tiny increases - fractions of a degree in a global average - will have a compounding and relentless effect.

Wildfires will continue to eradicate communities. Higher temperatures will render much of the earth essentially uninhabitable. Storms will overwhelm and flood areas where people live on a regular basis - including many of our largest and most populous cities. Water supplies will dry up. Heat waves and droughts will endanger much of the world's food supply. Season after season.Year after year. Without end. The cumulative effect will lead to massive migration, dislocation, and unrest.

Our current path puts us on course for a world that is very different from the one we live in. This is not in some far-flung future. We are seeing it now. We'll continue to see the effects accumulate in the years and decades to come. By the end of this century, the world could be violently transformed. And the changes will continue.



Lie Number 3: We have bigger problems right now. 

With most policy, political, and societal issues we can make changes. Politicians serve limited terms. They can be voted out. Their policies can be reversed. Tax policies can be altered. Health care plans can be enacted. The process of change can be slow, partial, and infuriating. But with time and enough dissatisfied voters, it can happen.

Or sometimes change doesn't happen. We muddle along for decades dealing with inefficiencies, sub-optimal conditions, and even gross injustice. But, we can. We do. We muddle along. Life goes on. And when the conditions are finally right for a change, it can happen.

Global warming is not like that. If the good people of 2040 or 2062 or 2087 decide that they have had enough - it will be too late. If they decide, only then, to get serious, then we will be on the wrong side of irreversible. Dramatic action in future years can prevent an even worse fate. It won't allow them to un-melt the glaciers, refill aquifers, or turn parched fallow fields back into fertile land.

The time to act to is now. We can continue to strive for progress elsewhere. But we really don't have more important issues to work on.



Lie number 4: This is a partisan issue.

Nobody will escape the effects of catastrophic climate change. It doesn't matter where you live. Rural, urban, north, south, coastal, inland - everyone will be affected. We're all in this together. And everything and everyone you care about is under threat.

We know that tribalism has an extremely powerful pull. We can see that the human capacity for rationalization is limitless. You can find reasons to look away, to ignore the problem, to oppose the solutions, to wait-and-see. There is no shortage of people offering convenient excuses and lies.

But you can choose to see the truth. You can choose to confront it and all of it's terrible implications. You can support, request, require, and demand action. And when you do, you can do so knowing it the right and necessary thing to do.




Lie number 5: It's already too late

It is not too late to act. We've been slow to act. At this point, some warming is inevitable. But it's not too late to achieve a stable, sustainable world. It's not too late to leave our children and grandchildren a world that is recognizably similar to the one we inherited.

We have the technology today. And that technology will continue to improve. We can see the extent of the problem. The solutions are known. Changes will be needed. We'll all be asked to make sacrifices. There will be costs. But the cost of inaction will greatly exceed of costs of doing what needs to be done.

This is the fundamental challenge of our time. But it's not too late to embrace it.

My Take on the "Whole AGW Scheme"

Recently I've been poking around on some political sites, looking for a lively debate (I'll post more on this adventure very soon). I wandered over to the forums on Politico where I was asked about my "opinion of the whole AGW scheme". I obliged. Here it is.


Regarding Anthropogenic Global Warming there are two main questions before us:

1. Are we human beings causing a rapid increase in global temperatures?

2. What, if anything, should we do about it?

In this post, I'll just look at question #1. This is not really a political question. Regardless of what I think, either all that carbon we're burning is causing the atmosphere to heat up or it isn't. Is this real or not? The honest answer is: How should I know? I don't spend my time examining polar ice cores or tracking ocean temperates.

There are a wide array of factors that have changed the earth's climate over the years. There were ice ages and warmer epochs long before humans were around. We are not the only agent of climate change. But we should take no comfort from this. The natural forces that have caused the earth's climate to change have occurred over a much longer span -- tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of years. On those occasions where the climate did change rapidly, the record suggests this was very bad news for the creatures who had the misfortune to be around at the time.

Let's just concern ourselves with the next 100 years or so, a blink in history, but it's our blink. Climate worrywarts estimate the average global temp will maybe increase around 5° F by 2100. That sounds like a small change. You'll never detect it standing in your yard. It's certainly not a threat to all human life. But still, if we believe the climatologists, even a 5° bump will trigger massive coastal flooding, crazy weather system, fresh water shortages, agricultural disruption and a host of other problems we might prefer to avoid.

A considerable majority of the people who spend their time on this issue are in agreement, and have been for years now. Global warming due to human activity is real. And it's going to cause some big, big problems for us humans if we don't do something about it. The question for us is, should we believe them?

Even if climate change is happening, it is happening at a pace that's hard for us as individuals to perceive. Gradual changes that happen over decades may trigger big environmental changes. But as we live day to day, we don't see it. We can't see it. But if we think about aggregate human activity, it's not that hard to imagine. For over a century now, we've been extracting oil and coal and other carbon-rich fuels from the ground, and burning them as fast we can. Currently, we burn about 85 million barrels of oil a day. We have massive operations going to pull these fuels out of the ground and we use them to run our cars, and heat our homes, and power our power plants. We've been doing this on massive scale for a while now and have every intention of continuing to do it. 85 million barrels. Every day.

Even if we don't know the exact net effect of releasing all these greenhouse gasses is, we know the basics of how these gasses trap solar radiation and keep the planet warm and habitable. We also know that we are extracting and burning fuels, creating more greenhouse gasses, as fast as we can. And that's pretty fast.

And why wouldn't we? Oil is great stuff. From the industrial revolution to the information age-- modernity, life as we know it, is made possible by energy. Power. Oil, and its carbon-rich fossil fuel friends, are the cheapest, most efficient, most scalable, most plentiful sources of energy we've got.

It is precisely because fossil fuels are so wonderful that we really don't want to hear about the nasty side-effects. It would be really, really swell if we could just burn all the oil we want as fast as want, for as long as we want and not ever have to worry about all that additional carbon in our atmosphere. That's a pleasant thought. But wishing won't make it so.

Wishful thinking will make us want to listen to those who tell us what we want to hear. As usual, there is no shortage of people willing to tell us there is a free lunch, that we don't have to sacrifice or work together. You can do what you want. Al Gore is a jerk, and bore, and Democrat. Don't trust him. Look, newly reveled emails show us that some scientists are cleaning up and spinning some of their data. Now we get to ignore everything they and their colleagues have ever done. And every other climate scientist is probably doing the same thing. Let's ignore them too. They can't even get each and every scientist, pundit, blogger and ex-vice-presidential candidate to agree there is problem! Clearly this is very controversial at best. We should probably just hold off and study the problem some more. Let's wait until everyone agrees. We'll do something then.

Unfortunately, the AGW deniers have a lot more media attention than scientific credibility. There are over 180 countries taking part in the Copenhagen conference. All of those countries are populated by citizens that don't want to be told to cut back, pay more, or use less. All of those countries have scientists who are telling their leaders that this is real, and we need to do something about it. I hope they are wrong. But I believe they are right.