By Paul Roberts / For The Herald
Back in 2018 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a “Special Report: Global Warming of 1.5°C” in which it characterized the impacts of global warming in stark terms.
The IPCC, a United Nations’ agency, is recognized as the world authority on climate science and global warming. The report identified increased risks to health, water supply, sea level rise and increased frequency and intensity of weather events and wildfires resulting from fossil fuel consumption.
Business as usual will exacerbate these impacts. Every increment of warming makes impacts worse, and it continues until we reverse course. Climate change has us at war with ourselves, and we are losing a winnable war. We are caught between the consequences of burning fossil fuels releasing larger amounts of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and the hard limitations of our atmosphere — our oceans and air — to absorb them.
Current carbon dioxide levels are higher than at any time in human history (427 ppm) and they are rapidly rising. Take a look at the interactive chart at www.co2levels.org. This proverbial “hockey stick” chart is an interactive graph with the last 1,000-plus years on the horizontal axis, and carbon dioxide levels on the vertical. While it measures carbon, it can be considered a surrogate for other GHGs including methane and nitrous oxide, both more powerful heat-trapping gases than carbon dioxide, but also rising.
Climate change is supersizing many of our weather events such as heat, fires, droughts, rains, floods, and hurricanes; making them stronger, longer and more damaging, as well as increasing sea level rise. Climate scientist and author Katherine Hayhoe said: “We are conducting a truly unprecedented experiment with our planet. And the faster things change, the greater the risks of some really nasty surprises happening.” She also stated that “modern civilization is built on the assumption that we have a straight road and stable climate, and that therefore the conditions we’ve experienced in the past, that we can still see in our rearview mirror, are accurate predictors of the future.”
These assumptions no longer apply. Past weather is no longer an accurate predictor of the future.
But there is something else at play known as the “Lucretius Problem.” Nassim Taleb, a statistician, risk analyst and author of “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable” describes the Lucretius Problem, named for Titus Lucretius Carus, a Roman poet and philosopher, as “the difficulty humans have imagining and assimilating things outside their own personal experience.” Climate change is creating events beyond our prior experience, blurring the lines between natural disasters and human-caused ones.
In his book “Electrify,” engineer and author Saul Griffith describes the world’s carbon emissions budget. “If we exceed our emissions targets, we will face irreversible tipping points that will make it impossible to stabilize the climate.” The more we learn about these tipping points, the more we understand they will happen sooner, and with more disruption, than we had previously thought. Griffith goes on to say, “Every year we wait — whether hoping for a political revolution of a technological miracle — has dire consequences to the health of our planet.”
Tipping points are another way of describing feedback loops which accelerate destabilizing impacts to the environment, economy and civilization. They include:
Uncontrollable wildfires resulting from the fire-weather conditions of high heat and low humidity.
Loss of boreal and rain forest biospheres due to drought, fires, diseases, insect infestation and deforestation.
Loss of permafrost, contributing to increased methane emissions.
Death of coral reefs and impacts on the marine environment and food chain.
Loss of arctic ice. Global temperatures are increasing more rapidly at the poles, accelerating ice melt which contributes to sea-level rise, and the albedo effect: the loss of ice that reflects the sun’s energy resulting in dark sea surfaces absorbing more heat energy.
Changes in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation that could disrupt the gulf stream and, with it, the circulation of Atlantic ocean waters and global weather patterns.
Collapse of major ice sheets on Greenland, West Antarctica and part of East Antarctica that would commit the world to around 10 meters of irreversible sea-level rise and the inundation of low-lying areas around the globe.
The environment and economy are linked. A healthy economy depends upon a healthy, stable and predictable environment. Civilization has been built on thousands of years of relatively stable climate, aka the Goldilocks Zone. Energy from fossil fuels obviously contributed to building civilization as we know it. However, continued use of fossil fuels is propelling us beyond the Goldilocks Zone. All of our experience is based on precedent, and the next era of climate change has none.
Now we are experiencing man-made weather shaped by GHGs already in the atmosphere. The degree to which we transform the weather for our children and grandchildren is being decided now and in the decades ahead.
By continuing business as usual in consuming fossil fuels, we are waging war against ourselves. We can win this war, but only if we take the challenge seriously and urgently. There is precedent for action on this scale. WWII and the U.S. space program both provide valuable lessons relevant to this fight. Mobilizing for a World War Zero — a zero emission economy — is the subject of the next Eco-nomics article.
Paul Roberts is retired and lives in Everett. His career spans over five decades in infrastructure, economics and environmental policy including advising Washington cities on climate change and past Chair of the Puget Sound Clean Air Agency Board of Directors.
Eco-nomics
Eco-nomics is a series of articles exploring issues at the intersection of climate change and economics. Climate change (global warming) is caused by greenhouse gas emissions — carbon dioxide and methane chiefly — generated by human activities, primarily burning fossil fuels and agricultural practices. Global warming poses an existential threat to the planet. Successfully responding to this threat requires urgent actions — clear plans and actionable strategies — to rapidly reduce GHG emissions and adapt to climate-influenced events.
The Eco-nomics series, to be published regularly in The Herald, is focusing on mitigation and adaptation strategies viewed through the twin perspectives of science and economics. Find links to the series thus far at tinyurl.com/HeraldEco-nomics.
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