LA is burning; climate repair is urgent

Cooling the earth directly can't be riskier than this

The standard line for excluding climate repair strategies from the debate is that they pose some hazy sort of risk. The risk is never defined, it’s alluded to in terms of unknown unknowns, of hypothetical harms too far outside our field of vision to even be talked about properly.

That’s one kind of risk. You know what’s another kind of risk, though? Having your house burn to the ground. Not in some evanescent, hypothetical kind of way. In a your-wedding-album-is-now-a-pile-of-ash way. In a your-dog-didn’t-make-it-out kind of way. That’s the kind of risk that keeps me up at night.

That’s the distinction that kept running through my mind as I watched the appalling footage of LA burning this week: a sick, pit-of-my-stomach feeling that as a society we’ve lost all ability to weigh these very different types of risk against each other. That we don’t know how to think about it straight, and so we’re going to keep making the wrong decisions again and again, increasing the risk of extreme events decade after decade until our societies are too weakened and disoriented to respond any longer.

LA was in literal flames as news came across the transom that the world already breached the 1.5 degree threshold the Paris agreement was meant to protect us from. That took less than a decade. That seems a portent. Angelinos must now be waking up to the fact that a 1.5 degree warmer world is already not safe. And the 2.5-3.0 degree warmer world we’re heading towards is substantially more dangerous than this.

Not, of course, that we can entirely attribute the LA fires as such to climate change. Single-event attribution is both a minefield and a shitshow. Patrick Brown, who is more often right than wrong on these things, explains that climate change has some impacts that increase the risk of fire in Southern California and others that decrease it. Where that mix lands in terms of any one event is uncertain.

But we must not miss the aggregate risk forest for the single-event attribution trees.

The risk of many types of extreme weather related disasters rises alongside CO2 across a range of modelling studies. It may rise moderately in the next few decades, or it may rise dramatically: scientists don’t really have the tools to tell us with any degree of certainty which risk path we’re on. Just that it’s not a good path, and it may be on a catastrophic one.

That this is happening to a species that understands how to reverse global warming in 5-10 years, and that that species refuses to talk about those techniques remains one of the strangest facts about this entire situation.

We could, if we wanted to, commit to the kind of big-time science and engineering development program we would need to put together a specific plan to repair the climate. If we got serious about albedo-based and ocean-based approaches, mean global temperatures could be back to their pre-industrial levels by 2035. We could very likely do it for tens of billions of dollars a year, not tens of trillions.

That won’t mean the West won’t burn again. The West always did burn, and will continue to burn now and then. Some level of climate risk is inescapable: ask Noah why he needed an ark in the first place.

But this level of risk, the level we face now, is escapable. And the appalling, far worse levels we’re heading towards are escapable. We know in theory how to escape them. All that’s stopping us from developing those ideas is a retrograde ideology that has crowded out all others from the climate field.

What will it take to get people to grasp this? What scale of tragedy will it take before we understand taking our most promising avenues to head off climate chaos off the table on hazy precautionary grounds catastrophically multiplies the climate risks we face? And when will enough of us start to demand government stops pussyfooting around and start properly funding this science?

I don’t know the answers to those questions. I do know one thing, though:

Time’s a’wastin’.