Wake Up! Our World Is Dying and We're All in Denial

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/visions/wake-our-world-dying-and-were-all-denial



I don't like to think about global environmental problems, and neither do you. Yet we can't deal with problems we can't face. Isak Dinesen wrote, "All sorrows can be borne if put into a story." Here's my story. In the cataclysmic summer of 2010, I experienced what environmentalists call the "'Oh shit!' moment." At that time, the earth was experiencing its warmest decade, its warmest year, and the warmest April, May, and June on record. In 2010, Pakistan hit its record high (129 degrees), as did Russia (111 degrees). For the first time in memory, lightning ignited fires in the peat bogs of Russia, and these fires spread to the wheat fields further south. As doctors from Moscow rode to the rescue of heat and smoke victims, they fainted in their non-air-conditioned ambulances. In July, the heat index in my town, Lincoln, Nebraska, reached 115 degrees for several days in a row. Our planet and all living beings seemed to be gasping for breath.

That same month, I read Bill McKibben's Eaarth, in which he argues that our familiar Earth has vanished and that we now live on a new planet, Eaarth, with a rapidly changing ecology. He writes that without immediate action, our accustomed ways of life will disappear, not in our grandchildren's adulthoods, but in the lifetimes of middle-aged people alive today. We don't have 50 years to save our environment; we have the next decade.

Nothing I'd previously read about the environment could quite prepare me for the bleakness of Eaarth. I couldn't stop reading, and, when I finished it, I felt shell-shocked. For a few days, all I could experience was despair. Everything felt so hopeless and so finite.

During this time, my grandchildren came to visit. As we picked raspberries, I thought about all the care we lavished on the children in our family. We made sure they ate healthy foods and brushed their teeth with safe toothpastes. We examined and treated every little bug bite or scratch. And yet, we--and I mean all the grandparents in the world, including myself--hadn't worked to secure them a future with clean air and water and diverse, healthy ecosystems.

[longship]

1. The Arctic ice melt this last summer should be a wake-up call.

James Hansen has had his fingers on the planet's pulse for some time. If he is alarmed, we all ought to be.

It all reminds me of this:

A bit cynical, but nonetheless a funny look at things.

[BlueToTheBone]

2. I believe that in the end, Earth will go on.

It is just we humans who won't.

[AverageJoe90]

9. Nah, we'll survive.(Let's be realistic here, shall we?)

When you really think about it, humanity has in fact survived at least one disaster even worse than global warming. When Mt. Toba erupted 74,000 years ago, it took out about 90% of our ancestors, and also caused a significant extinction of other life as well.

At least with global warming, we can mitigate it and deal with it's effects over time, even in the worst case (plausible) scenarios(though by how much will depend on how much warmer it gets by 2100). On the contrary, if Yellowstone were to erupt tomorrow, we'd be in even bigger trouble, partly because of the suddenness of the event; we'd have little time to figure out anything at all, and there'd be little we could do to really save ourselves.

In all honesty, though, why take the chance of 6*C warming which could wreck civilization as we know it? It's not a big possibility, but it does exist, and given the run of bad luck we've had in recent years, it's not a risk worth taking, at all.

[GliderGuider]

11. I still don't get why you think we have any say left in the matter.

We have 3 degrees in the pipeline already. And 3 degrees leads inexorably to 6 when the methane feedbacks kick in.

I suspect if we stopped emitting any carbon at all, right now, we'd still hit 6 degrees average (12 at the poles) by the end of the century.

Sure we survived Toba. And we'll survive this. All 100,000 of us...

[AverageJoe90]

14. And I'll probably never get exactly why you think we don't.....

....when the science clearly says otherwise:

http://skepticalscience.com/global-warming-too-hard.htm

And, unfortunately, I must once again remind you that this "we can't stop this" argument does sound rather similar to one put forth by a certain Christopher Booker(pay particular attention the bolded text):

"It's too hard
"The fact is that there is no one in the world who can explain how we could cut our emissions by four fifths without shutting down virtually all our existing economy. What carries this even further into the higher realms of lunacy is that such a Quixotic gesture would do nothing to halt the world’s fast-rising CO2 emissions, already up 40 per cent since 1990. There is no way for us to prevent the world’s CO2 emissions from doubling by 2100" (Christopher Booker)"

As for what's in the pipeline? Nobody really knows for sure and it will probably depend on when action is taken; 3 degrees, up to 6 or more if methane feedbacks do get bad enough to double Co2 effects? Definitely possible, but, that's with little to no action taken by 2100.

[GliderGuider]

16. Yes, I agree with Booker.

Last edited Mon Oct 22, 2012, 09:49 AM - Edit history (1)

The problem as I see it is that the whole CO2 emissions situation is an iterative multi-player Prisoner's Dilemma game in which the payoff isn't even well defined. Because of that it's virtually impossible to prevent free riding because of issues of national sovereignty and the possibility of reciprocal trade wars hurting the responsible players more than the free riders.

Based on what I've seen in the CO2 emissions curves, at the tables of climate conferences and in the actions of political leaders around the world, there is virtually no appetite for reducing CO2 emissions if there is any possibility of negative economic consequences attached to that action.

Because of that, I think there is virtually no way to get the world to agree to any course of universal CO2 reduction that would get us off the 2 ppmv slope we're currently on (and that is currently increasing). Even at 2ppm per year, that's another 180 ppm by 2100, for a total of 570+ ppm.

Now 2100 is a long way off, and anything is possible. We might hit peak oil, coal and gas by mid-century, and be constrained by circumstance to reduce our emissions. Civilization might crack and crumble for other reasons than AGW. But I think those are what it would take to reduce our CO2 output. Even if we stabilize the atmosphere where it is, at 400 ppm - which is itself a Herculean and unlikely task - we're already in danger territory.

Based on this line of reasoning, I prefer to be one of the people who leaves the mitigation to others and concentrates on adaptation instead, on the assumption that we may need to adapt if the tinkering doesn't happen to work. Having some people doing each seems like a more sensible strategy than putting all our money on (Correction: mitigation). Always hedge your bets.

So I'm perfectly willing to let you beaver away hopefully, if you will permit me to place my bets on red when yours are on black. We need both to maximize our chances - it's the only game on the planet after all.

[CRH]

17. Well said, Thank You, n/t

[NickB79]

13. You still haven't submitted evidence Toba was worse than AGW

Even the most ardent supporters of the Toba supervolcano bottleneck theory state that the global volcanic winter lasted 5-10 years, with a few centuries of below-average temperatures after this as the environment recovered. While very damaging to many species, we see almost no evidence in the fossil record that there were widespread species extinctions. A few other species, found mostly in Southeast Asia and Africa, show genetic bottlenecks as well, but no major extinctions have been noted. All the megafauna of the Holocene pulled through, until they were wiped out later as the last ice age ended and humans hunting the survivors to death.

On the other hand, we're already looking at a species extinction rate high enough due to habitat loss and climate change that scientists are asking if we've entered the 6th mass extinction: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v471/n7336/abs/nature09678.html

Palaeontologists characterize mass extinctions as times when the Earth loses more than three-quarters of its species in a geologically short interval, as has happened only five times in the past 540?million years or so. Biologists now suggest that a sixth mass extinction may be under way, given the known species losses over the past few centuries and millennia.

[Speck Tater]

3. What I'm about to post is PURE heresy, but I'll say it anyway...

The problem seems to be industrial civilization.
The solution might be to get rid of industrial civilization.
If anyone is on track to destroy the economy and bring civilization crashing down it's the Republicans.
Therefore: We should all vote Republican to hasten the end of civilization.

(No, of course I'm not serious! But on the other hand, ...)

[GliderGuider]

4. I agree with you 47%... n/t

[Kennah]

5. I get the joke, but ...

... I think the GOP will only advance the industrial civilization. Yes, in the end, it will come crashing down hard. However, things will be far more devastating the longer we prolong the industrial civilization. Turning away from the GOP will end it sooner, in a more orderly fashion, and with far less death, destruction, and devastation.

[GliderGuider]

7. There's another way to look at it

The faster this round of civilization crashes, the better it will be for the rest of life on the planet. We would have less time to degrade the biosphere still further.

There is no way we will be able to close down our affairs in an orderly manner, so the best plan might be to "spend it all and declare global bankruptcy".

It will happen pretty much the same way no matter who wins the election in the US, since this is a global phenomenon. More depends on the actions of China and Europe than on the outcome of the presidential election.

[Kennah]

8. Difficult to know for sure, but I think we could mitigate the situation, if we were willing

I know, I know. That is one helluva of mother-sized if.

A crash of civilization will be nothing short of horrifying. When the last shred of Climate Change denial fades, I worry we might go further off the deep end. "Fuck it! We're toast. Might as well make a helluva party. Drill, baby, drill!"

Actions of China are mostly driven by the U.S. Their carbon emissions are directly attributable to producing shit for U.S. consumers.

I would disagree that the Presidential race matters not to Climate Change. CAFE standards began under Jerry Ford, and Obama created the first increases to the original standards. Dubya put in some weak ones, but they weren't to start until 2020. Obama pulled it back to 2016, the numbers started ratcheting up in 2011, and even tougher numbers by 2025. Is it enough? No, of course not. But, it is a start to the end of denial.

Every year, things will have to get tougher and tougher to start making a real difference. The next 10 years, who knows. Maybe we avoid catastrophe and merely live until conditions where we impose draconian changes. Maybe not.

[GliderGuider]

10. The thing that has me most concerned is the rate of natural CO2 removal from the atmosphere

It will take 100,000 years to remove the excess CO2 we've already dumped into the atmosphere, and still every year we add another 2,000 years' worth. For every one of those 100,000 years we will be heating up the planet, even if we stopped dumping any CO2 today. If we keep dumping CO2 at the current rate for another 25 years, it will take the planet 150,000 years to recover...

In the face of numbers like that, American CAFE standards may be a moral victory, but they don't seem like an actual win - not to me at any rate.

Regarding "drill baby drill" and "eat drink and be merry" - this is what we're doing right now. The realization that the end is nigh can't actually crank up that part of the party any higher than it already is. We're eating the planet as fast as we humanly can already.

[Kennah]

15. I wouldn't say CAFE is a moral victory, just a necessary step to get out of denial

CAFE could go to 100 MPG, and mandate nothing less than 50 MPG can be sold, and it still would not matter.

I know, I know, that seems to concede we're doomed.

We're going to hit 400 PPM of CO2 in the next couple of years, probably around 2017. There is nothing magical about 400 PPM compared to 401 PPM or 399 PPM. Similarly, there was nothing magical about $4 per gallon compared to $4.01 a gallon or $3.99 a gallon. But humans tend to react to the crossing of thresholds. 400 PPM may be one.

I don't expect really serious efforts to start until we're rounding 500 PPM, and I don't think it's going to take us 50 years to get there. CO2 PPM was rising at the rate of about 2 PPM per year for the past decade, but for the decade before it was an increase of 1.6 PPM per year. We're speeding along and we're accelerating.

[Shampoobra]

6. Lester Brown's 'World on the Edge' makes the same case: we have until about 2020

World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse
by Lester R. Brown
http://www.earth-policy.org/books/wote

It's available on Kindle or as regular hardcover or paperback, but the site also offers a free PDF of the entire book:

http://www.earth-policy.org/images/uploads/book_files/wotebook.pdf

[Redlo Nosrep]

12. I Follow an Intelligent Doomsday Blogger

who has written multiple essays about this subject. Brace yourself if you want to read his take on it, especially this entry from September:

http://survivalacres.com/blog/advocating-hopelessness/#more-3684

Normalcy bias is alive and well everywhere, even when the signs are overwhelmingly obvious we now already live on Eaarth.

[CRH]

18. I had not happened on that particular site yet, ...

more and more who have examined the whole, seem to be putting it all into the same context, the same small nut shell. Welcome to Eaarth. Thanks for your post.