The earth and human life are in mortal peril. We are staring down the barrel of a loaded gun, the climate crisis. We cannot escape it, an especially depressing thought when one considers the choices we continue to make ensuring that we won’t.
Background
In the mid-1970s, I taught history as an advanced graduate student at Stanford. In those days, the menace looming over humanity was the Cold War and MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction), the dominant and fundamentally insane military doctrine of the age. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists regularly published a clock, showing the closeness to midnight, the shortness of time before the enormous stockpiles of nuclear weapons would actually be used. The clock was usually at five minutes before midnight, i.e., on the brink of human annihilation.
In one session on an idyllic northern California afternoon on this wondrous campus I asked my students: Do you believe that you are unlikely to live your normal lifespan, and that sometime soon your lives will be cut off by a nuclear catastrophe? Nearly all hands shot up. It shocked me to know that these youngsters were living this fear. I shared their feeling, but I was older and had a science background, which I felt made more informed and better able to sense the immense destructive power of these weapons were. Yet the fear had filtered down into these relatively unformed psyches.
On reflection, this should not have been a surprise. By then, popular culture had absorbed “On the Beach” by Nevil Shute, published in 1957 and made into a film in 1959, which describes a post-nuclear apocalyptic world of massive radiation clouds completely depopulating the Northern Hemisphere and slowly drifting south, promising similar annihilation there. Jonathan Schell would subsequently drive home the point in 1982 with “The Fate of the Earth, another best-seller arguing that human extinction was likely if atomic weapons were ever used.
On April 26, 1986, up jumped the devil in the form of a gigantic radiation spill from Chernobyl. The closed society in which it occurred managed to delay for a brief time the rest of world’s understanding of the disaster’s scale. In the end, news did get out and, coming as it did a mere three years after Three Mile Island, it spelled the end of nuclear power.
Early Warning of a New Extinction Threat
In the early 1990s, we began to be warned of a new form of extinction: planet-wide climate warming caused by increasing levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. These had been measured at the Mauna Loa Observatory on Hawaii over decades by David Keeling of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
In 1988, James Hansen, relying on work he had published ten years earlier in scientific journals, and on Keeling’s CO2 statistics, testified before Congress and publicly declared climate change an existential menace. He said “with 99% confidence” that a recent sharp rise in temperatures was the result of human activity.
He had reason to do so, having studied under James Van Allen at the University of Iowa. Van Allen, discoverer of the radiation belts enveloping the earth, suggested that Hansen study Venus. Hansen learned that the surface of Venus was over 900 degrees F — hot enough for lead to exist only in liquid form — and its atmosphere >90% CO2. Hansen saw at once the mortal danger in Keeling’s recordings of monotonically increased CO2 on earth.
In the ensuing thirty years, the human brain struggled to accept, let alone do something about, the slow-moving global catastrophe that is climate change. Unlike the immediacy of the nuclear threat (obvious from any video of an atmospheric test of a nuclear device), climate change is the slow, glacial movement of ice to water, of warming ocean currents, of droughts and storm frequency. It is, in short, easy to ignore. And even if its occurrence is acknowledged and accepted, the common response to date has been, “It won’t affect me for years”.
This attitude jeopardizes human existence, as we witness the “positive feedback” loop already in action: melting white icecaps expose dark water or earth, which leads to yet more heating and more rapid melting. With more melting comes more heating as frozen methane hydrates and forces global unstoppable, run-away temperature increases.
The oceans, the womb of life on earth, are changing in irreversible ways. We have detected the reduction in phytoplankton, a basic link in the ocean food chain, and in krill which forms under rapidly melting ice sheets. We note, too, the small but real change in ocean pH caused by the increase in dissolved CO2, which will prevent shellfish from forming their shells, and which is already damaging coral reefs.
Ocean currents, including the vital Gulf Stream, are changing. As the ocean has warmed, its ability to absorb CO2 has been reduced by half. This will increase the release of methane and become part of the positive feedback loop. In addition, as glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica melt, rising ocean levels push water inland to feed hurricanes, typhons, and diluvial downpours and tornadoes. They also expand northward the habitat for disease-carrying insects.
Geopolitical Ramifications
One example is Bangladesh, a Muslim country with 165 million people in an area the size of Wisconsin (six million). Most of the population lives on the country’s coast at seven feet above sea level. This corresponds to the rise in sea levels expected by the end of this century, a rise that is inevitable; it will occur even if, between now and then, we reduce to zero the increased concentration of CO2.
Bangladesh’s neighbor is Hindu India, a nuclear state. It requires no great imagination to project what will occur when the current trickle of people fleeing increasing tidal invasions becomes a flood. One estimate has the number of Bangladeshi refugees at more than 17 million by 2030. That India will agree to absorb this influx is doubtful. More likely is the eventuality that it will use force to prevent it.
In many countries, immigration is already the chief cause of populism and its concomitant xenophobia, racial strife, and the mobilization of nationalistic rhetoric that glorifies violence. When the few million migrants become tens of millions, the political response will be devastating. It is not far-fetched to predict that we will once again have to deal with the specter of nuclear Armageddon. Even the Pentagon, in its 2014 “Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap,” referred to climate change as a “threat multiplier,” with rising seas and more severe weather events exacerbating a variety of dangers such as infectious diseases and terrorism.
Alternatives
There are alternatives to CO2-producing power generation. One possibility is to revert to nuclear technology, which produces no CO2. China, for one, has committed to this by building more nuclear power plants than the rest of the world combined.
Unfortunately, nuclear power plants require massive amounts of concrete, and concrete plants are the largest single CO2-producing industry. This unfortunate side effect notwithstanding, the non-CO2-producing energy from nuclear plants is critical to our survival.
Another alternative is to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. But it would need huge amounts of energy to move the air through specialized equipment, energy that would be in addition to that required to run the device itself.
There also is nuclear fusion, the process by which deuterium and tritium are fused to create a reaction that generates power. Although its viability has been established in laboratory environments, it needs temperatures exceeding 100 million degrees Celsius and intense pressure to make deuterium and tritium fuse, and sufficient confinement to hold the plasma and maintain the fusion reaction. This makes its implementation on a broad public scale in the foreseeable future questionable.
Denialism
The USA is the chief culprit, historically as the main polluter of CO2 and now as the chief denier of climate change. It has institutionalized corporate and oligarchic power through court decisions and gerrymandering, its policies driven by constituencies whose power and influence are wedded — intentionally and explicitly — to short-term benefits for the few at the expense of long-term survival for all. And there is great short-term political and economic benefit in denying or downplaying climate change as an existential threat.
I long thought that technology, especially the internet, would save us from human irrationality. But I have come to see that the cerebral cortex, where logic resides, is constantly overwhelmed by the id and the limbic system, as evidence by their thriving in the 8chan and darknet ecosystems.
Ultimately, humans are ill-equipped to address the threat of climate change:
- It is slow-moving, with huge inertia. Once started, it is difficult and time consuming to stop. Our cranial neurons are configured to respond to faster-moving threats, which makes it easy to delude ourselves with, “What we can’t see can’t hurt us”. In reality, climate change will annihilate us.
- We are confronted by the “marshmallow dilemma”: take one marshmallow now, or forebear and receive more later. Evolution has wired our brains to grab what is available now (the short-term good), and to not bother with the long-term, even when we know the long-term threat to be our own demise.
- Humans are dominated by emotion. The rational portion of our brain is small, whereas dealing with climate change demands all the cold logic and scientific and technical expertise we can muster. Instead, we play video games, watch fantasy movies, and engage in behavior that only illustrates how unfit we are to inhabit this planet. We may be smarter than the dinosaurs wiped out by a meteor, but not by much.
The consequence is that we are on track to be the first species to witness, understand, and experience its own extinction. We know that our reluctance to act will probably kill us but are unable to make the choices necessary to prevent it.
If this inability is innate, is depression not the proper response? That the feeling is not universal explains our predicament: if we all saw the matter the same way, we would have started long ago to do something about it. Reality tells us that far too few of us are prepared to grasp the enormity of what is before us.
Yet we cannot live without hope, even if a rational assessment of our dilemma suggests there is none. Cassandra’s life must have been pure torment.
