What’s That In The Road? A head?

Notre Dame, Before the Disastrous Fire

Over at Yale Climate Connections, a recent article exhorts us to abjure climate doom and gloom.

“This is the fight of our lives, and it’s a multigenerational task,” Hassol says. “We need what’s been called ‘cathedral thinking.’ That is, the people who started working on that stone foundation, they never saw the thing finished. It took generations to get these major works done. This is that kind of problem. And we have to all do our part.”

The difficulty with this view is that it requires several unstated conditions to be true.

1. The collective will of the humans of earth is a multigenerational transnational Climate Corps. No autocrats, dictators, gangs, kleptocrats, wars, shareholders, corporations, pension funds, or religious proselytizers can interfere significantly.

2. The planet has all the years it takes to build a cathedral. It took 83 years to build the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. It took 200 years to build Notre Dame, 240 years to build York Minster, 35 years to build St. Paul’s in London, 120 years to build St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, but only 4 years to build St. Peter’s in Manhattan.

3. While climate activists are succeeding, no new fossil fuel, chemical, deforestation, or mass extinctions are increasing at the same time, defeating the advances in climate correction.

The conditions in 1. and 3. are demonstrably not being met. The question raised in 2. requires further iteration. Let’s look at the menu. Do we mean how many years has the planet got before it no longer sustains any life? Do we mean how many years do we have, given the current state of development and climate change, before it gets too hot to sustain life? Something else?

NASA tells us that “Humans have caused major climate changes to happen already, and we have set in motion more changes still. However, if we stopped emitting greenhouse gases today, the rise in global temperatures would begin to flatten within a few years. Temperatures would then plateau but remain well-elevated for many, many centuries. There is a time lag between what we do and when we feel it, but that lag is less than a decade. While the effects of human activities on Earth’s climate to date are irreversible on the timescale of humans alive today, every little bit of avoided future temperature increases results in less warming that would otherwise persist for essentially forever.

The benefits of reduced greenhouse gas emissions occur on the same timescale as the political decisions that lead to those reductions.

Without major action to reduce emissions, global temperature is on track to rise by 2.5°C to 4.5°C (4.5°F to 8°F) by 2100, according to the latest estimates.

But it may not be too late to avoid or limit some of the worst effects of climate change. Responding to climate change will involve a two-tier approach:

“Mitigation” — reducing the flow of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere

“Adaptation” — learning to live with, and adapt to, the climate change that has already been set in motion. The key question is, what will our emissions of carbon dioxide and other pollutants be in the years to come?

Thirteen months ago, U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found that the world is likely to surpass its most ambitious climate target — limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial temperatures — by the early 2030s.

Beyond that threshold, scientists have found, climate disasters will become so extreme that people will not be able to adapt. Basic components of the Earth system will be fundamentally, irrevocably altered. Heat waves, famines and infectious diseases could claim millions of additional lives by century’s end.

At our current global pace of carbon emissions, the world will burn through its remaining “carbon budget” by 2030. Doing so would put the long-term goal of keeping global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) irrevocably out of reach.

In 2022, China approved its largest expansion of coal-fired power plants since 2015. Amid soaring profits, major oil companies are dialing back their clean-energy initiatives and deepening investments in fossil fuels.

The world will not avoid catastrophic warming unless rich nations speed up their own carbon cuts and help poorer countries do the same.

What’s not yet clear is whether world leaders will follow through. When asked about Guterres’s call for developed countries to move faster toward net-zero emissions, a State Department spokesperson instead directed attention toward China, which is now the world’s largest annual producer of greenhouse gases.

But the planet can’t afford further delays or finger-pointing, the U.N. chief said.

“Demanding others move first only ensures humanity comes last,” he said. “We don’t have a moment to lose.”

So that’s the playing field. What do we see in the road ahead? Among other things:

1. The collapse or severe undermining of institutions that have existed for many generations, including nation-states, banking, finance, transnational governing bodies and authorities.

2. Ongoing housing crises as formerly safe areas are threatened by sea level rise or repeated flooding, causing migration and housing supply shortages in other, safer regions. Refugee camps.

3. Failures of diplomacy and international relations. More political polarization.

4. Declining birth rates.

5. Continued severe drought and wildfires, deluges of historic floods and rain.

6. Crop failures due to extreme or unusual weather patterns.

7. Significant challenges with pollination and seeding, perhaps due to reduced insect populations. invasive species and/or contagions harming natural ecosystems and wildlife.

8. More pandemics.

9. More human migrations and uprisings. More nationalism, ignorance, MAGA type reactions to existing capitalist and socialist regimes that left thousands of communities worldwide stranded economically and unserved by government.

10. Continued depletion of water supplies, disappearance of glaciers, accelerated sea level rise.

Let’s recognize that it’s important to stare death in the face, acknowledge it, and proceed from that fork in the trail. It is not okay to pretend that the planet is not in mortal peril, it is not okay to pretend that we the people can fix it faster than fossil fuel companies and their government minions can kill us all, and it is not okay to lie to our children about what’s in the road ahead.

What to do? Vote, at every level from local to national, and pay attention every day.

We’re all in this together.