To pick up a city and move it inland 20 miles
Scientist and astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson said Sunday that, in the wake of devastating floods and damage caused by Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, climate change had become so severe that the country “might not be able to recover.”
In an interview on CNN’s “GPS,” Tyson got emotional when Fareed Zakaria asked what he made of Homeland Security Adviser Tom Bossert’s refusal to say whether climate change had been a factor in Hurricanes Harvey or Irma’s strength — despite scientific evidence pointing to the fact that it had made the storms more destructive.
“Fifty inches of rain in Houston!” Tyson exclaimed, adding, “This is a shot across our bow, a hurricane the width of Florida going up the center of Florida!”
“What will it take for people to recognize that a community of scientists are learning objective truths about the natural world and that you can benefit from knowing about it?” he said.
Here, in the US? A completely different political system.
Tyson told Zakaria that he believed that the longer the delay when it comes to responding to the ongoing threat of climate change, the bleaker the outcome. And perhaps, he hazarded, it was already even too late.
“I worry that we might not be able to recover from this because all our greatest cities are on the oceans and water’s edges, historically for commerce and transportation,” he said.
“And as storms kick in, as water levels rise, they are the first to go,” he said. “And we don’t have a system — we don’t have a civilization with the capacity to pick up a city and move it inland 20 miles. That’s — this is happening faster than our ability to respond. That could have huge economic consequences.”
I’ve been thinking that too, in fact I thought it with Katrina and Sandy – as of course did a lot of people. It’s hard to ignore: there are a lot of cities on coasts, and a direct hit on one city costs billions to repair. It’s clearly not going to work to just keep getting wiped out and then fixing it and getting wiped out again the next summer. But what’s it going to take for the people in charge to do anything about it? Total devastation, I guess.
I’m increasingly inclined to think it’s going to take a completely different species with a completely different brain wiring…
Unfortunately, in the mind of the people where I live (who seem to have seized total control of the political system), those cities are filled with coastal elites. Besides, these hurricanes are just warnings from God that those cities need to quit (1) feminism; (2) sex and pornography; (3) gay marriage; and (4) immigration. All of those things have made God very, very mad, and he is letting the liberals have it but good. (I’m not sure when Texas became an enclave of liberal thinking, but….)
In addition, they claim not to see any signs of it where we are, and if we don’t see it, how could it be real? Of course, we do see it, in the form of extremely dry years and the fact that it is still summer here in late September. Warm dry winters lead to rivers that dry up. The aquifer is dropping at alarming rates in some places. But…this isn’t global warming. It’s just a “natural cycle”, because “weather always changes, amirite”.
I think Bjarte is right:
If we cut all emissions by 100%, when would things return to “normal”? 10 years? 100 years? Ever?
It’s a dark question for a Wednesday, but are we just doomed?
Ben,
One, perhaps the only significant, flaw in the environmental movement is in thinking there’s a such thing as ‘normal’ when it comes to the Earth’s climate, and that if we figure out how to return to that ‘normal’, everything will be fine. The problem is that there *is* no ‘normal’ — there are shorter- and longer-term cycles, evidenced through certain data points we can measure back through hundreds of thousands to millions of years. The last ten-thousand-year idyll has been relatively stable, of course, but the Earth’s climate has been dynamic for billions of years, and the sliver of time during which human culture arose is a vanishingly small sample size to try and get anything like a decent statistical idea of what the Earth’s expected climate is like.
For example, humans have been around in more-or-less their modern form for between 100K and 200K years. During that time, there was at least one major worldwide glaciation event, where ice packs up to three miles thick covered vast swathes of the continents in the Northern hemisphere. By most accounts, this is our second ‘interglacial’ period, relatively brief windows of time in between heavy glaciation events (which tend to last between two and ten times longer than the more temperate periods in between). It is a virtual certainty that the end of that first interglacial truncated any real technological or cultural progress our essentially-fully-modern ancestors could have made, and kept us scrabbling along the mid-latitudes and only very slowly crawling up toward the poles for tens of thousands of years.
If the Earth’s climate had had a temperate ‘normal’, like we’ve come to expect, there would have been precious little to stop those early humans from spreading across the globe and founding a global culture fifty, seventy, a hundred thousand years ago. Of course, if that ‘normal’ had really lasted far back enough that it obviated the Quaternary period, it’s likely we would not have evolved at all, so the thought experiment only goes so far.
The point is that, regardless of how much or how little we wind up contributing to the Earth’s changing climate (and, to be clear, our throwing up a hundred million years’ worth of carbon into the atmosphere in under two centuries is certainly not ‘little’), the ice is coming. The deserts are coming. The rainforests at the poles are coming. Eventually, the Sun will grow luminous enough to boil away the oceans, and then strip the Earth’s atmosphere until the planet’s nothing but a cinder.
There have always been grave challenges to human life, ever since humans evolved. The climate has always been a major factor in those challenges. The fact that we’ve had the last ten thousand years of relatively mild, relatively predictable weather is a problem that has set up both environmentalists and climate-change deniers to have the wrong argument. With or without human activity, the idyll we’ve enjoyed is not permanent. On a long-enough timeline (certainly less than a hundred thousand years), there is nothing we can do about that. The arguments we should be having are about what changes are coming, and how we can best prepare for them (including mitigating the damage we’ve already done).
There’s no going back. But that’s no reason not to try as hard as we can to keep going forward.
Ben
According to David Archer of Real Climate…
The article is from 2005, but I don’t think estimates have changed much since then. I might be wrong. Anyway, this latter 1/4, the “long tail” of the carbon curve is too often ignored in estimates of how long human CO2 emissions stay in the atmosphere:
And this matters, since, as Archer writes, “Major ice sheets, in particular in Greenland, ocean methane clathrate deposits, and future evolution of glacial/interglacial cycles might be affected by that long tail.”
Archer is BTW an excellent science communicator. His book The Long Thaw (2009) is one of the best books on climate change for a lay audience that I for one have read.
So are we doomed? If forced to make a prediction, I would have to say yes. The decade we’re in now – The Decade of Trump and post-truth politics – has been described as the last decade in which mankind still had a realistic chance of bringing climate change somewhat under control (provided we start collectively and immediately applying the breaks a lot more aggressively than any government or any major political party anywhere in the industrialized world is even considering. If actions speak louder than words, there is practically a universal consensus that the “reasonable”, “responsible”, “non-extreme” thing to do is to release enough carbon to raise global temperatures by at least 4 °C above pre-idustrial levels, and that anyone who even thinks about making the cuts required to limit global warming to 2 °C is a crazy, delusional, radical extremist whose views can be dismissed as absurd a priori. To fix that problem is going to take a hell of a lot more than a steady decrease in the price of solar panels, and to be honest I don’t think the human brain with all its biases and infinite capacity for rationalization is up to the challenge.
@Bjarte: That is exactly what I “wanted” to know. Thanks. (“Thanks.”)
Ben
My “pleasure”
Oh, haven’t you heard? All we need is for the Baby Boomers to die off en masse, and then the Millennials will rise up and fix that problem – and every other problem – because they are the bestest, smartest, greatest generation ever born, and if they send enough tweets and texts, things are going to get great. (The first half, abut rising up, is almost verbatim to a conversation I had with a millennial friend last week; the last part, about tweets and texts, is how I translated what he and others are telling me they will do into non-obfuscatory language).
After all, if it weren’t for Millennials, we wouldn’t know global warming exists, we wouldn’t be working on ozone depletion, it never would have occurred to anyone to save the whales, and we all would just be choking on the smog because there would be no Clean Air Act (which somehow managed to get passed about 15-20 years before the first millennial was born, so figure out for yourself how it is that they invented the environmental movement and developed the first ever environmental consciousness. I’m guessing Satan planted all those environmental references in books dating back to the classical period, built an illusion of Edward Abbey and Aldo Leopold from his fevered desire to hurt people, and back-dated the environmental legislation into the term of Richard Nixon to discredit Bernie Sanders and help the GOP take Obamacare away…or something).
Sometimes I think I’ll just stop talking to millennials. Since I teach college (environmental science!), that would make things difficult.
Iknklast
Yeah. I remember Susan Jacoby talking on a panel about how much she hated the trope that “the young always win the day” when offered as a cause for optimism. Her response was something like “Well, they do if they show up”, which is of course far too often not the case. She went on to talk about how millennials (on average*) may be pretty liberal and tolerant**, but one thing most of them are definitely not are activists which is why we can’t necessarily count on them to be a force for political change. There is certainly nothing in my experience that fills me with an irresistible urge to contradict her…
* There are obviously also some very nasty trolls among them who were, at least according to Angela Nagle, instrumental to the rise of the Alt-Right and the election of Trump.
**A less charitable interpretation might be indifferent.
Funny you should say that. My millennial friend of the other day was shocked, I tell you, shocked that I would say that the abuse of women on the internet is perpetrated in part by millennials. He is sure I must be mistaken. Why people take some statistic like, say, 80% of millennials are [fill in blank with tolerant thing]*, and assume that means that “all millennials are kind, decent, human beings that are all so much better than any member of any past generation has ever been”.
*made up statistic