Climate chaos is going to take its sweet time
Catastrophe scenarios are real, but not imminent
Nobody wants to say so plainly. But the really bad climate outcomes probably won’t hit in your lifetime.
I’m talking about the disaster movie stuff: the big ice shelf collapses, the multi-meter sea-level increases, the runaway positive feedback loops that stop the AMOC and leave Paris and London with the climate of Newfoundland and Labrador, the Ministry for the Future-style million-casualty heat waves.
These things are real.
But if climate models are to be believed, they’re probably problems for the 22nd century. The 10 degree spikes in arctic temperatures, the genuinely haywire hydrological changes — are set to hit after most of us are dead and buried.
The IPCC’s latest assessment report is full of warnings of abrupt and irreversible climate change, but then it turns out that by “abrupt” they mean “a change that takes place over a few decades or less.”
If it wasn’t for our narcissism, we’d register this as normal. There’s no good reason to expect planetary processes to play out on a time scale meaningful to a single human being.
On a planetary scale, a change that takes place over a few decades is indeed abrupt. It’s just that when climate activists warn us about abrupt climate change, they mean next week.
A more realistic timeline suits nobody’s purposes.
For a generation now, climate activists have been fighting to obscure it, convinced that without a sense of imminent threat, there’s no way to build political momentum for decarbonization. The climate blob seems determined to amp up any result that seems to make climate threats seem more imminent. The result is widespread misunderstanding about when the shitstorm is coming, and an epidemic of climate anxiety that has no real grounding in the short-term risk involved.
Point this out, and you’ll be accused of denialism, though.
Of course, we might be wrong. Deep uncertainty pervades every aspect of the climate space. We do not know the likelihood of alternative futures, and we can’t agree on how our actions are related to consequences. Nobody wants to be the guy glibly saying everything is fine one second before stepping on a landmine. In some ways, alarmism is the only safe course of action.
To the millions who roll their eyes at the blob’s alarmism, though, the tendency is to react by rejecting climate science altogether. This is much worse, but then the tragedy of denialism is that it keeps confusing science with The Science, and ends up throwing the baby out with the bath water.
The uncomfortable reality is that society-shattering climate chaos is probably both very real, and a good 50 years in the future. This has become a kind of Zombie Truth: something that is known but forgotten, because it’s in no one’s interest to acknowledge it.
Given the decades-long lags involved, our emissions decisions over the next 30 years really will have a massively outsized impact on the lives of people in the 22nd century. Then again, those people will likely be far wealthier and immeasurably more technologically advanced than we are. On the other hand, they’ll likely still be dealing with problems that are far easier to prevent (now) than to remediate (in their time.) Some of the most disruptive effects, like sea level rise, are likely irreversible.
So what are our actual obligations to those future generations? How much ought we be willing to sacrifice today for their sake?
I don’t know what the answers to these questions are, exactly. It stands to reason that we’ll have a discounting rate, so we’d rationally want to spend less to avert a climate catastrophe in 2100 than we’d spend to avert a climate catastrophe in 2030.
The climate blob — the people who turn climate science into The Science — get it that the more distant the threat seems, the less likely people will be to support drastic change to forestall it. Which is why they keep trying to compress the public’s perception of the threat timeline. Do that long enough (and successfully enough) and all you end up achieving is getting a bunch of old Van Goghs covered in tomato soup.
It’s not good science, but it’s also not good politics.
It squanders long-term credibility for short-term effect. But the climate crisis will be the ultimate slow-burn crisis, a centuries-long slog. Without public trust in science, we’re genuinely screwed. Endangering the public’s trust in science for short-term policy wins strikes me as hideously counterproductive.
Those who speak on behalf of The Science aren’t proving to be very reliable stewards of climate science. It’s a theme.
Are you familiar with Bjorn Lomborg?
I appreciate the way Quico helps us to see the psychological and ideological forces that keep us from informed public discussion of global heating.
And I would like to mention one thought on how to counter these forces: Would putting a total global heat gain number alongside the CO2 number could help alter perceptions? Such a number is perhaps much more dramatic than citing the ocean temperature rise that results from this heat energy gain?
My information is that the earth’s heat energy gain since the 1950s is about 350 x10^21 joules, which is about 600 times the annual global human energy consumption. In any case, it is a very large and dramatic number. Would use of such a number focus attention on the kind of steps we need to take?