Originally posted on sciy.org by Ron Anastasia on Fri 09 Mar 2007 02:24 PM PST
How to Think Differently About Climate
If 2006 was the year climate change broke big, with magazine cover stories and Oscar-winning films, 2007 will be the year the implications begin sink in.
From the Stern Review to the IPCC report to Davos, nearly all the world's credible authorities have now accepted that climate change is real, here and dire.
That is an important step, but three more steps remain.
1) Climate change demands that our goal be carbon-negative growth.
The greatest threat we now face is not ignorance but the half-measures and faltering steps that convince people that doing something means you're doing enough.
There are simple standards here: we need to drastically reduce, then eliminate, then reverse our greenhouse emissions, and we need to do so on relatively predictable timelines. Just as we need to aim beyond reducing our overall ecological impact to one planet (and begin healing the systems we are currently destroying, laying on the planet an ecological handprint, if you will), we need to set formal and binding goals that go beyond keeping the damage to a merely disastrous level, and begin to undue the damage we've caused.
(Nor can we trust that some desperate attempt at geo-engineering will save our bacon. If we can't trust our leaders to take common-sense, well-understood steps today, why should we trust them to employ dire, unproven and hubristic steps in the future? Even if employing giant space curtains or dumping mountains of minerals in the sea did not set off some awful unintended consequence (for instance, "seeding" the oceans to increase carbon uptake might very well worsen the ocean acidification which some scientists are already warning could be one of the worst effects of climate change), to advocate for such schemes is to completely ignore the history of such massive scientific projects -- from the development of nuclear energy to the attempt to build a missile defense system -- which have been consistently mismanaged, shrouded in secrecy and perverted to serve the interests of the corporations which build them.)
So, climate negative. Any plan which doesn't measure itself against that bar is no plan at all. To get a sense of how difficult our task will be, take a look at the boldness and complexity of Energy [R]evolution, a blueprint for reducing global CO2 by 50% worldwide by 2050.
Cutting our CO2 in half, the authors say, will take major breakthroughs in solar, wind, geothermal, bioenergy, hydropower, and advanced fossil fuel technologies. It will take behavioral changes. It will take policy shifts, changing the way we tax energy and pollution and incentivize innovation and investment to level the playing field. And it will take proceeding on different paths in different places. It will be, in short, a massive undertaking.
Now imagine that as a half step, and one that will come too late. Imagine not just radical change, but transformation.
2) Climate change demands that we build rapidly towards resilience.
We've written before about climate commitment and the need to go beyond reducing emissions and move towards adapting intelligently to a warming and increasingly unpredictable world. The degree to which this is true is well illustrated by Impacts of Climate Change, a new report by the consultancy Global Business Network on the potential impacts of relatively unrestrained greenhouse gas emissions, which could include what they dryly refer to as "macrosystemic discontinuity," but which we might think of as "hell in a handbasket."
For climate change impacts not only weather, but everything, as these five examples taken from the report illustrate:
Ecosystem collapses
"There is a common pattern we’re seeing in ecosystems around the world:
gradual changes in vulnerability accumulate and eventually you get a
shock to the system, a flood or a drought, and boom, you’re over into
another regime. It becomes a self-sustaining collapse." -- Stephen
Carpenter
(More)
Water scarcity
Quotes the Pacific Institute saying "as many as 135 million people will die from these diseases by 2020. Even if the explicit Millennium Goals
announced by the United Nations in 2000 are achieved...between 34
million and 76 million people will perish from water-related diseases
by 2020."
(More)
The proper scope of the state
"As Chris Walker of Swiss Re points out, if the state steps in to
provide insurance to protect against climate change-driven storms, it
will soon become clear that grandmothers in Albany are paying to insure
the lifestyle choices of beachside condo-dwellers."
(More)
Civil order
"If a developed-world government conspicuously fails to respond to a
disaster in a way that meets citizen expectations, the collapse of
civil order is likely to ensue very rapidly. While developed countries
are likely to be able to restore order relatively quickly, in the
longer term such collapses of order can undermine the legitimacy of
both political leaders and political institutions."
(More)
Tourism
"For countries that are staking their development strategies on tourism
(most notably, small island nations in the Caribbean and the Indian and
Pacific oceans), the stakes are especially high. Ironically, these
countries figure to be among the greatest losers in the reshuffling of
tourism that climate change will produce. Warmer winters in North
America and Europe will decrease demand for the sunny winter escapes.
At the same time, the “beach product offering†is likely to become less
attractive as the heat index rises, beaches erode, sea and coral
quality decline, and vector-borne diseases increase. (Diseases may also
be spread by international tourism, and the industry is uniquely
vulnerable to shut-down in the face of local epidemics.)"
Looking at impacts like these -- and we have often taken up the idea of climate foresight here, imagining non-obvious ways in which our world will change with the climate -- we begin to see that maintaining enough stability to buy the time to address the damages we've done our planet will itself be a major challenge, and one we can't tackle soon enough.
That means resilience. That means survivability. That means recognizing how brittle the systems on which we depend actually are, and working quickly and intelligently to replace and retrofit and reimagine them so that they can withstand the kinds of torque a changing planet will put on them.
3) Climate change demands holistic solutions.
We cannot solve the problems climate change is making manifest simply by cutting emissions and building sea walls. That's because climate change is not an issue, it is a symptom: it is not a discrete problem to be solved but part of the warp and weave of problems that define and worsen our civilization's inability to sustain itself. If we want to stave off the collapse that will inevitably come when that which cannot continue does not continue, we need to move forward with a broad front of solutions which interlock to solve many interrelated problems at once.
For instance, some sources say that forest clearance and burning is responsible for a large portion of the CO2 we generate. Mostly, those forests are cleared for commercial logging, ranching and subsistence farming. All three causes are complex, requiring international agreements, consumer and shareholder action to change markets, development assistance, transparency and human rights agreements (to protect activists and enforce existing laws), property rights and land reform (to give peasants the means to stay on their land and the incentive to treat it well) and technological advances to provide alternatives and mitigate impacts. In other words, tackling this aspect of climate change links us by necessity to a host of other issues, and the same is true nearly across the board.
To think that we can "solve" climate change without addressing poverty, human rights, democratization, conflict, epidemic disease, biodiversity loss, water scarcity, food issues and the like is to suffer from carbon blindness. Any climate plan which does not have sustainable prosperity as its ultimate goal will fail, just as surely as any effort to address these other challenges which ignores climate change will fail.
So our situation demands of us that we start speaking differently about climate change and the duties it imposes on us. We need now to imagine and pursue carbon-negative growth, we need to brace for the coming storm, and we need to work to make the world as a whole profoundly more stable, bright and green.
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