On climate change: we have seen the enemy, and it is us

 

No sane person would say we must stop burning fossil fuels immediately – tomorrow – bad as these fuels are.

Unfortunately, many powerful forces are pushing against making any transition at all. These forces include well-funded efforts to lobby and spread disinformation to influence the political decision-making process.

The “deniers” have the benefit of not having to prove their own “scientific” case. They just need to sow enough discord and confusion to create some doubt. And that isn’t very difficult in today’s confusing algorithm-driven, social-media mad, topsy-turvy world.

In 2022, the global average temperature of planet Earth was 1.26 degrees Celsius higher than in pre-industrial days, perilously close to the limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius set for 2050. When the numbers come in, 2023 is likely to be the warmest year in recorded history.

There were over 40 days when the global average was 1.5 degrees Celsius higher than pre-industrial averages. It’s looking very likely that we‘ll exceed our 1.5 degrees Celsius global average target by the 2030s, decades earlier than we had thought.

A degree or two doesn’t sound very much. But if you take that one extra degree of heat and multiply it with the trillions upon trillions of tonnes of the planet’s soil, water and air, the amount of energy contained is almost unimaginable.

And that energy does what energy does – it makes things happen, whether it’s droughts, storms, floods, or melting glaciers and icebergs.

Some of the effects may sound beneficial: Greenland may become the world’s biggest plot of farmland. But by then, the melted ice and snow of Greenland, as well as that in Antarctica, would have swamped New York, Miami, Tokyo, Singapore, Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro and other coastal communities.

This will happen on top of the growing human population, depletion of resources and escalating conflicts among nations. In fact, it’ll make them even worse.

Will more carbon dioxide, being plant food as some “fans” say, be good for us? Well, it’ll certainly be good for some plants (those which haven’t existed yet), but how could it be good for existing plants that have existed at pre-industrial levels of carbon dioxide for hundreds of thousands of years?

The force of nature

Even among today’s plants, especially food crops, minor changes in temperature, light and precipitation can cause crop failures, either directly or indirectly. Would doubling one of the most important factors – carbon dioxide – not have some unimaginable effects that we can’t handle? Try doubling your plant’s fertiliser and see how much good that does.

We must understand and accept what nature is. It’s not some wise and loving “mother” as in the Avatar movies. Nature is just a convenient shorthand for the state of balance of all the environmental forces – the temperature, humidity, the sun’s energy we absorb and lose – around us. And this balance changes over time.

As far as humans can remember, the balance has been quite good – not too hot, not too cold, the so-called Goldilocks zone. The balance moves slowly, in what is called geologic time, and living things generally get to adapt to it through evolutionary forces.

Periodically, cataclysmic changes happen — huge asteroids like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs, or massive volcano eruptions such as the ones that created the Siberian and Deccan Traps, eons ago. Things changed very quickly then, with many species disappearing, and new ones appearing.

That’s how it works. “Mother” Nature doesn’t guarantee the survival of the human species. We probably can handle changes over geologic times, but such major environmental changes over decades are unlike the sudden blows from asteroids or the eruptions of volcanoes.

Too rich to care?

Most climate change deniers come from the prosperous West. You don’t hear much from China and other newly prospering nations, countries which are where the West, especially America, was in the last century.

Back then, there was optimism and faith and trust in various human institutions, whether political or scientific. Such optimism and faith often resulted in successes such as feeding the rising world population and lifting much of it out of poverty, but also scientific and technological achievements such as going to the moon.

But too much of anything is never a good thing. We now have a society, especially in the West, that’s increasingly suspicious if not downright hostile to the old institutions, such as the political ones, and unfortunately other institutions too such as the scientific ones.

It’s like the west has become fat and lazy and no longer cares about tackling major issues and challenges facing humankind. But those in the newly prospering countries are still more optimistic and excited, and because of that, are investing more in their institutions, whether political or scientific.

And no, there isn’t this global conspiracy by Bill Gates or George Soros or the World Economic Forum – among the usual suspects – to control the world by scaring everybody with climate catastrophes. It’s just a lazy conclusion by those for whom the reality of a warming planet is not very convenient.

Making an effort

Will humans perish? Probably not, certainly not in the short or medium term. But there’ll be human casualties that can run into the millions and even billions as the environment shifts to a less predictable and survivable state. The hardy cockroaches may be able to survive it, but us humans and other mammals may not enjoy the change so much.

We’ve seen however when humans do get their act together – such as making big economic sacrifices as well as big scientific advances to combat ozone depletion, acid rain and other side effects of human “progress” – we can succeed. It’s not a foregone conclusion that we’re doomed.

Even now, there are signs of progress. More than half of the total energy usage of the British Isles in 2023 was generated from sustainable sources.

China and India are also making huge progress on sustainability, because they recognise the risks to their population, as well as the opportunity to leapfrog the old technological and economic hegemony of the West.

We in the poorer third world must really understand that a climate catastrophe will affect us more than anybody else, even while our contribution to its cause is minimal, both on a per-capita and especially on a cumulative basis going back a few hundred years. We have the most to lose.

It seems that the biggest obstacle to save humanity is humanity itself, which has grown indolent and stupid after years of the good life, and which is rapidly forgetting and forsaking its own role as stewards of the Earth as well as guardians of its own future.

Our only solution seems to rest on the young ones. Hopefully they’ll get angry enough about being handed down a screwed-up world by their parents’ generation that they’ll foment their own “Sustainable Revolution” to replace the industrial one, and roll back the disasters that now look increasingly likely.

Perhaps they’ll solve humanity’s biggest challenge – saving ourselves from our biggest enemy, ourselves. - FMT

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.