Guest post: The slow nuke of climate change is already detonating
Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on This is who he is.
Also, he will have the nukes. He’ll use them. I don’t think there’s any way he won’t. He has no inhibitions, no understanding, no impulse control, no ability to reason or check himself – why would he not use them?
He could be game over. It’s looking likely.
And of course the slow nuke of climate change is already detonating at a rate of 4 Hiroshima bombs a second. Even if we cut carbon emissions to zero at this very moment, this accumulation of energy would continue for many decades due to the enormous inertia of the climate system. That’s just how long it would take for the global temperature to stop rising. Getting back to “normal” temperatures is going to take millennia.
Of course this all assumes that there are no unpleasant surprises in store, which seems unlikely. Despite all this talk of “alarmism” and “hysteria”, climate scientists are actually far more guilty of understatment than overstatment (Naomi Oreskes has called it “erring on the side of least drama”). If the edge of the cliff is 100 ft ahead, then aiming to stop after 180 ft is not “half as good” as aiming to stop after 90 ft. And there are many such “cliffs”:
– Ice reflects lots of energy-carrying sunlight back into space. When you release carbon into the atmosphere, the planet heats up, which means less ice, which means less reflection of sunlight, which means even more global warming.
– Water vapor is also a greenhouse gas. When you release carbon into the atmosphere, the planet heats up, which means more water vapor, which means more greenhouse effect, which means even more global warming.
– Permafrost stores vast amounts of Methane, which is yet another greenhouse gas. When you release carbon into the atmosphere, the planet heats up, which means melting permafrost, which means more methane in the atmosphere, which means more greenhouse effect, which means even more global warming.
– The oceans absorb vast quantities of carbon (which is a serious problem in itself, since it leads to ocean acidification). But warm water holds less carbon than cold water. When you release carbon into the atmosphere, the planet heats up, which means warmer oceans, which means less absorption of carbon by the oceans, which means more carbon in the atmosphere, which means even more global warming.
– Etc… etc…
At some point these positive feedback-loops may become self-perpetuating, such that the planet will keep warming even if we cut our carbon emissions to zero…
…which, of course, we are not doing. We already have 5 times more fossil fuels in store than we can possibly burn while having a reasonable chance of limiting global warming to 2 degrees (which is already way too high, maybe fatally). And we are still looking for more. It’s the most urgent existential threat our species has ever faced, and it’s hardly even on the cultural radar. As I have previously written elsewhere, it’s as if we’re in a car heading for the cliff mentioned above, and the only discussion going on inside mainstream culture is whether we should aim to stop after 1000 ft or 1500 ft (or never).
But at least with the Paris accord – for all its shortcomings – we finally had in place a strong international consensus that the problem was real and that something (just not something in particular) needed to be done about it.
Enter Trump.
THE END
If there is any consolation, it is this: the Earth is a six-sextillion ton ball of molten iron, with a smattering of trace elements throughout, a sprinkle of water on top, and a thin scum of organic matter that’s made a home in the rusted surface. The planet, and that scum, have survived awesome forces both sudden and drawn out, from all of Siberia burning and releasing polar methane, to asteroid impacts, to the current ice age (which at the current moment is at an interglacial maximum, and, in the absence of human activity, quite likely would have been headed back to a global glaciation, for good or ill).
Human activity has radically altered the biosphere and the climate, but not more than the planet has seen before; in other words, we can wreck the place enough such that it is inimical to human life, but it is almost impossible to wreck it badly enough to be inimical to all life. There’s nothing we can do that’s any worse than setting a continent on fire, say, or sending glaciers to the tropics. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t take any action to avert the catastrophes that are unfolding, but it means that if we do not take any action, we’ll have simply been one more in a long string of mass extinction events. The thin scum of biofilm has survived five of these so far; a sixth, while tragic for us and most of the higher-order mammals we’ve built our civilization around, would not leave the planet as a whole in any worse shape than the previous four.
Seth, that is no consolation at all to me. It seems certain that there is life somewhere else in the universe. That doesn’t absolve us. We are not carrying the torch for life, we are carrying the torch for our sort of life and our sort of culture.
We’re human beings; we’ll survive. Though we may find ourselves eating dwindling supplies of Soylent Green sooner rather than later…
I second David. It’s bad enough in itself that we are facing a sixth mass-extinction, and even worse that humanity actively brought it about, despite having all the requisite knowledge to know the consequences of its actions, simply because it valued ideological dogmatism and short-term profits for the obscenely rich over the future of young people (and most other species on earth). As Neil DeGrasse Tyson put it: “The Dinosaurs never saw that asteroid coming. What’s our excuse?”
#3 Maybe there will be some survivors, but I wouldn’t take it for granted. Humans may be more adaptable than any other species, but it also has greater capacity for destruction than any other species. In the light of recent events it is not at all clear to me that the former trait has the upper hand..
Life is resilient and robust. Civilization, I’m beginning to see, is not. Trump is not a harbinger of a Dark Age, he is a Dark Age all by himself.
Jumping to another metaphor, the election of Trump is like some sort of self destructive auto-immune disorder of the American body politic.