An excerpt from a BBC column by Mark Mardell and my gentle rebuttal:
But I wonder whether the desperate search for solutions blinds us to some of the big questions about the subject. It seems to me that for years the debate was hindered by the calls to "Save the Planet". It is quite clear the planet is doing quite nicely, thank you, and would continue to revolve on its axis if temperatures doubled tomorrow.
What is threatened are higher life forms in general, and us in particular. What climate change will do is put under water places where people live, destroy the crops and water supplies they live on. It is because it would trigger unacceptable mass migration and deaths that it is a danger, not because we have some mystical union with the biosphere.
We feel closer to some parts of the biosphere than othersLet's face it, we want to save polar bears because they are furry and impressive and the Brazilian earwig doesn't get the same consideration. I'm sure if we had been around at the time we would have wanted to save Triceratops, too.
What people are talking about is reducing climate change, altering the way things are going at the moment. But if it is changing anyway, what is our attitude to that? If the polar ice caps are going to melt anyway, in thousands of years, should we be investing in technology to stop that natural process? Presumably keeping the environment static would put the brakes on evolution. Do we want to, should we want to do that?
I think Mr. Mardell either wrote the last three sentences towards the end of his day, or he was just being rhetorical.
Yes, there is natural climate change. But the IPCC report released Feb. 2 -- six days before Mardell's Feb. 8 effort -- has found there is a 90 per cent or better chance that the climate change we are currently seeing is being driven by human activity.
Changes that would normally take place over centuries are happening over the course of decades. I would hardly chalk that up to "evolution." In the worst-case scenarios, it's a road to catastrophe.
Otherwise, Mardell is quite right when he says that we don't need to worry about the Earth per se.
The earth was likely formed more than four billion years ago. The first life forms probably showed up about three billion years ago. The first primates showed up about 60 million years ago.
In terms of humanity, the first species of the Homo genus showed up between 2.4 and 1.5 million years ago.
Our species, Homo sapiens, is believed to be about 400,000 years old. The Industrial Revolution started about 1750, about 399,743 years after our ancestors showed up, but really kicked into gear in 1850.
Now, 157 years into the second phase of said revolution, there are scenarios that could see a rise of up to 6.4 degrees Celsius in the global temperature by 2100.
That would occur under what the IPCC calls the A1F1 scenario:
A1. The A1 storyline and scenario family describes a future world of very rapid economic growth, global population that peaks in mid-century and declines thereafter, and the rapid introduction of new and more efficient technologies. Major underlying themes are convergence among regions, capacity building and increased cultural and social interactions, with a substantial reduction in regional differences in per capita income. The A1 scenario family develops into three groups that describe alternative directions of technological change in the energy system. The three A1 groups are distinguished by their technological emphasis: fossil intensive (A1FI), non-fossil energy sources (A1T), or a balance across all sources (A1B) (where balanced is defined as not relying too heavily on one particular energy source, on the assumption that similar improvement rates apply to all energy supply and end use technologies).
So, if the main assumptions are rapid economic growth, global population that peaks at the mid-century point, has better technologies but is still fossil intensive (I believe about 80 per cent of our energy comes from fossil use), with a continued rise in emissions, we could see the Earth's temperature rise up to 6.4 C.
If we did reach the high end, what effect would that have?
This cheery scenario was put forward in the Independent:
+6.4°: Most of life is exterminated
Warming seas lead to the possible release of methane hydrates trapped in sub-oceanic sediments: methane fireballs tear across the sky, causing further warming. The oceans lose their oxygen and turn stagnant, releasing poisonous hydrogen sulphide gas and destroying the ozone layer. Deserts extend almost to the Arctic. "Hypercanes" (hurricanes of unimaginable ferocity) circumnavigate the globe, causing flash floods which strip the land of soil. Humanity reduced to a few survivors eking out a living in polar refuges. Most of life on Earth has been snuffed out, as temperatures rise higher than for hundreds of millions of years.
Author Mark Lynas (his book Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet comes out March 19) wrote the following in an accompanying commentary:
An eco-alarmist fantasy? Unfortunately not - having spent the past three years combing the scientific literature for clues to how life will change as the planet heats up, I know that life on a 6C-warmer globe would be almost unimaginably hellish. ...
How people might fare is anyone's guess. With the tropics too hot to grow crops, and the sub-tropics too dry, billions of people would find themselves in areas of the planet which are essentially uninhabitable. This would probably even include southern Europe, as the Sahara desert crosses the Mediterranean. As the ice-caps melt, hundreds of millions will also be forced to move inland due to rapidly-rising seas. As world food supplies crash, the higher mid-latitude and sub-polar regions would become fiercely-contested refuges. The British Isles, indeed, might become one of the most desirable pieces of real estate on the planet. But with a couple of billion people knocking on our door, things might quickly turn rather ugly.
Hopefully, we're smart enough to do what we can to keep the planet from getting that warm.
However, the probable range is put at 1.8 to 4 C. More possible scenarios from the Independent:
+2.4°: Coral reefs almost extinct
In North America, a new dust-bowl brings deserts to life in the high plains states, centred on Nebraska, but also wipes out agriculture and cattle ranching as sand dunes appear across five US states, from Texas in the south to Montana in the north.
Rising sea levels accelerate as the Greenland ice sheet tips into irreversible melt, submerging atoll nations and low-lying deltas. In Peru, disappearing Andean glaciers mean 10 million people face water shortages. Warming seas wipe out the Great Barrier Reef and make coral reefs virtually extinct throughout the tropics. Worldwide, a third of all species on the planet face extinction
+3.4°: Rainforest turns to desert
The Amazonian rainforest burns in a firestorm of catastrophic ferocity, covering South America with ash and smoke. Once the smoke clears, the interior of Brazil has become desert, and huge amounts of extra carbon have entered the atmosphere, further boosting global warming. The entire Arctic ice-cap disappears in the summer months, leaving the North Pole ice-free for the first time in 3 million years. Polar bears, walruses and ringed seals all go extinct. Water supplies run short in California as the Sierra Nevada snowpack melts away. Tens of millions are displaced as the Kalahari desert expands across southern Africa
+4.4°: Melting ice caps displace millions
Rapidly-rising temperatures in the Arctic put Siberian permafrost in the melt zone, releasing vast quantities of methane and CO2. Global temperatures keep on rising rapidly in consequence. Melting ice-caps and sea level rises displace more than 100 million people, particularly in Bangladesh, the Nile Delta and Shanghai. Heatwaves and drought make much of the sub-tropics uninhabitable: large-scale migration even takes place within Europe, where deserts are growing in southern Spain, Italy and Greece. More than half of wild species are wiped out, in the worst mass extinction since the end of the dinosaurs. Agriculture collapses in Australia.
Now, if we do nothing, we'll certainly "achieve" the least-worst scenario. I think we can agree that if true, it would still be very disruptive, even at the low end.
And in the worst-case scenario, we could see ourselves living in hell.
Now, if that happened by 2100, that would be 250 years after the Industrial Revolution got serious.
Two-hundred-and-fifty years represents about 0.0625 per cent of the time that Homo sapiens has been on this planet. That's all the relative amount of time it would have taken to really, really fuck things up for ourselves.
And we would have done it while consuming a non-renewable resource: fossil fuels.
To put it in the context of my 47-year-old life, that would be like me finding an inheritance and then going on an 11-day bender that essentially ends with me in the grave. I think we can all agree that wouldn't be prudent.
For even more context, suppose my doctors warned me at day seven that if I kept this up, I'd be dead within four days -- and I told them I was having too much fun to stop? How dumb would I look in retrospect?
To stretch our carbon binge out to one per cent of our time as a species, we would have had to make it last 4,000 years.
Again, in the context of my life, it would be like me self-destructing in just under the last six months of my existence instead of 11 days.
To go a bit further, 250 years represents 0.00000625 per cent of the planet's history.
In other words, it's nothing.
The IPCC report says that if we acted now and held the line on greenhouse gas emissions, it would take a millenium for the extra greenhouse gases we've already pumped into the atmosphere to dissipate.
That's about 0.000025 per cent of the time the Earth has existed. Again, it's nothing.
Geological time scales are a whole different world when compared to a culture in which long-term means paying off a car loan or home mortgage.
Even if we make a total hash of life on earth by the end of this century because we were willing to run a serious climate deficit for short-term prosperity, the Earth itself will keep on turning. Again, we're a blip; our species has been around for 0.01 per cent of the planet's history. The lineage of sharks probably goes back 450 million years.
Over time, Earth will stabilize. If there's a climate catastrophe, it just might do so without us. That scenario isn't likely, but neither is it totally impossible -- especially if we don't change.
The question is, knowing all that, are we prepared to make some changes? If not now, then at what point?
If we wait too much longer, however, it might not matter.