The End of the World as We Know It

[stormsewer]

I'll get back to finishing out my Hugo posts, but something else is on my mind. Last week may be when I finally gave up hope that we're going to weather climate change without major damage to our civilization. Maybe that's a good thing.

I was talking to a friend the other day about nuclear power, and how frustrating it is to me that so many environmental organizations oppose it when it is currently our only carbon-neutral energy source that is ready at-scale. If you're serious when you say climate change is an imminent existential threat to society, you should be serious about nuclear power. It has its problems, but they are paltry compared to the problems presented by climate change, and we could even think of nuclear power as a temporary emergency solution if we really don't like it. But we don't think of it that way. It's like you're having heart attack, but before you get in a car you want to force a debate on whether taking the Corolla or the Prius to the hospital would be more environmentally sound. It's almost as if the Left doesn't really believe climate change is real, any more than the Right does; they just find it a useful bogeyman for pushing their agenda. Which is exactly the Right's feeling on the matter. Sometimes I'm not sure they're wrong.

Anyway, my friend, who is something of a climate activist, mentioned this article by David Roberts, who gives specific examples of this happening. He liberally links to others of his articles, and I read a few more.

This one talks about how blatantly we are doing absolutely nothing about climate change. Despite promises from everyone who signed the Paris Accords to do what is necessary to keep warming to 2°C (the level often considered the maximum to avoid big problems, though even that is likely to cause all sorts of havoc), we are not doing what is necessary, not even close. If we're going to have a shot at doing that, we need to start decreasing carbon emissions immediately AND get them negative by about mid-century. That doesn't look like it's going to happen.

This one talks about how currently we're on track for 4°C or more of warming by the end of the century [1]. It talks about how climate models have been saying since 1990 that this climate change thing is manageable if we get serious about it in the next five-to-ten years, and isn't that weird? For twenty years they've been saying we'll be okay if we get serious about it in ten years? It turns out the way they've been able to do that is via increasingly unrealistic decarbonization scenarios.

And then right now there's the Amazon, one our major carbon sinks (and key biodiversity resource, etc.), burning down. The G7 has pledged $22 million to fight it. Compare this to the $945 million dollars pledged to rebuild the Notre Dame Cathedral within 24 hours of it burning down. Brazil's president is refusing to take any money, anyway, though he might think about it if Macron apologizes to him.

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was adopted in 1992; since then we've put about as much carbon into the atmosphere as in the entirety of human history before that.

In other words, in 1992 the nations of the world all got together and agreed that greenhouse gas emissions were a problem and we should do something about it. And then all proceeded to make the problem much, much worse.

Part of me thinks that it'll just be what we deserve if this ends up tearing down our civilization. But actually that's not satisfying at all, because the people who will suffer the most for it are those who had the least to do with making it that way.

When I think a lot about this stuff, it fills me with rage. But there's no real outlet for this rage, so it just kind of dissipates, and I go back to my daily life. What does it make sense to be doing that I'm not already doing? Should I go full Greta Thunberg? Would it make any difference? Should I just stick to looking out for me and mine [2]? Should I just work harder at my job, for a company aiming to becoming a leading light in the transition to a bio-based economy? Start dragging my 18-month-old to activist meetings?

I worry about the future my child and his hypothetical children will face. Sometimes I worry that having children is a bad idea right now, but mostly I convince myself that it is not such a terrible choice. Ten to fifteen years ago I was worried about Peak Oil [3]. I remember talking to a friend at the time about whether I wanted to have children given my worries about the future, and he said, "but that would mean giving up all hope for the future." That has stayed with me. Certainly if I didn't have kids it would be much easier to convince myself not to care about all this.

I'm not sure I have an actual conclusion here. I am optimistic that civilization will pull through this, eventually, but it's looking like it will be rough riding here for a while, in the meantime. Let's try to do what we can now to smooth the way.



[1] Note that we've already warmed 1°C, so it would be 3°C warmer than right now. That's about 5.5°F, and note we can apparently expect the land to warm about twice as much as the planet as whole. Imagine the place you live being on average about 11°F warmer than it is now. That would mean, for instance, that Texas will be like Las Vegas is now, and Las Vegas will be, well, quite uncomfortable.

[2] "Go North, young man!"

[3] While I wouldn't say that's no longer an issue, this figure, originally from here, implies climate change may actually get us first.