The reality of climate change isn’t just troubling. It’s pants-wettingly alarming.
by David Atkins
If you do nothing else today, please check out Gaius Publius’ third post in his important series on climate change, in which he details the extinction event that awaits us at our current rate of carbon emissions. It’s far too extensive to remotely do justice to here, but below is a snippet:
For a very long period, from the Cambrian until about 15 million years ago, global temperatures have swung widely, spiking up to +7°C or more, and down to –2°C, measured against modern (“age of man”) average temperature.
▪ More recently we entered a period of ice ages, in which global temperatures rarely exceeded 2°C above the modern norm. During this period, hominids evolved. Late in this period, man (homo sapiens) evolved.
▪ Then 12,000 years ago, we entered a time (the Holocene, “today”) in which average global temperatures stay within a very narrow range, ±½°C of the global average for the period. For the last 12,000 years, we’ve seen almost no global fluctuation.
During this period, man settles down, becomes a farmer and builds cities. Our lives today — civilized, settled, technological — are products of the Holocene and are entirely encompassed by it…
Got that? Our entire growth as a species and subsequent civilization has occurred during a period of remarkably stable climate.
Here’s where we’re going:
Now let’s look at the future. This is the heart of this piece, the last in our introduction to the global warming story. Where are we going and when will we get there? In the second essay in this series, I wrote (emphasis added):
If we go to 3°C warmer, we may go to 7°C or beyond
For a reason I’ll discuss next time, if global warming is man-made — and few unbought scientists think otherwise — then 3°C warming may well be just the halfway point to the full disaster. By that I mean, because of the way the socio-political process works, the “never stop burning carbon” scenario could easily take us right past 3°C to a 7°C (12½°F) warmer world — in the worst case, by 2100 — and perhaps beyond.
That’s double the compression of Hansen’s 3°C [by 2100] scenario — it means 3°C warmer by the mid-2050s and 7°C warmer by the end of the century. The discussion of that outcome is also in the IPCC literature, the same literature Hansen used to make his mass-extinction prediction. This is their own worst-case scenario. It’s not a prediction, but it’s one of the possibilities. …
For a look at times when the earth was as hot as 7°C above pre-Industrial norms, you have to look at the Mesozoic Era and earlier …
That’s an unusual symmetry, from a +7°C spike (or more) in the deep past to a +7°C spike (or more) in the very near future. What’s different about the modern spike is the time it will take to create it. Each of those spikes in the Paleozoic Era (in orange on the second chart) occurred across tens or even hundreds of millions of years.
The temperature spike we’re creating, at our end of the chart, could well occur within the next 100–200 years. In the most chaotic situation, if governments have almost no control of populations, +7°C by 2100 becomes much more likely. No one will be able to put the brakes on carbon emissions.
Hansen says that +3°C will trigger a 20–50% extinction scenario. Think what +7°C will do. We might survive as a species (we’re awfully smart), but the world will certainly see another Great Dying.
There’s much, much more to the post than just this. Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing.
The reality of this issue above all but also other pressing issues is part of why I argue that the cost of inaction is far higher than the risk of action on issues like the filibuster. Yes, it’s true that by making our processes more democratic and subject to radical change, we put ourselves in danger should a Tea Party ever rise to power.
But then, if that does happen we’re screwed anyway. Keeping along the status quo doesn’t help us much more than the Tea Party can hurt us. If we don’t start to act with some urgency, it won’t be worth being involved in politics, anyway. At that point it won’t be about fixing the system, but rather surviving its breakdown.
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