"Film at 11," as we used to say about television reporting on breaking news.
Climate change is the sort of slow-moving news that does not lend itself to the 21st century social media frenzy -- film at 11 does not work with this story. Weekly heat waves will come and go, receiving their due treatment in daily media, but the impact of the story of long-term temperature averages that increase by a half-degree over a period of years is not as exciting as is the urgency of a few days of ten degrees above average readings on the thermometer.
Today's always-on media hype craves the recognition brought on by dissemination of the most intense excitement or most soothing entertainment ("here's a new cat video!") and so fails at any mission to cogently report on small, incremental happenings that quietly accumulate power. Complex, forward-looking analysis is not usually grasped by the intellectual immediacy that is the hallmark of a short attention span.
Here is why this slow-moving story is so important. In fact, it is so important that it deserves to be called "vital."
Nations -- especially the United States -- spend huge amounts of time, money, effort and political posturing protecting themselves from threats due to terrorism. But the resources and abilities of any terrorist organization are pitifully puny in comparison to those of the nations that they might attack.
Islamic State (ISIL/ISIS), for example, fields a force of a few thousand fighters, almost all of whom must be retained in Iraq and Syria to hold on to the shrinking amount of territory that they control; its fellow-traveler organizations are even more constrained. With no navy, air force, nor a cohesive command-and-control for their tiny ground forces, these thugs have no ability to strike decisively-crippling blows against America or any other developed nation.
Fear, conjured out of frustration of their weakness, is their most potent weapon, but only because our domestic political and media cultures act as amplifiers. At its worst, terrorism as we know it is capable only of scratching at the edges of civilization. And yet its threat-level is enough for the U.S. to justify the spending of hundreds of billions of dollars for protection.
If such a threat provides that justification -- we can accept that it does -- then a much greater threat should provide at least the same justification for action on an even greater scale. Climate change is a much greater threat.
A warming climate will result in extreme weather activity that is, to put it plainly, progressively more extreme. Wind storms will become stronger, heavy rainfall will become more intense, sparse rainfall will be further reduced. Damage to life, property, agriculture and the environment due to heat, flooding, winds and drought will increase. Warmer weather supports the spread of disease. Microorganisms, such as bacteria and viruses, are prolific and adaptable; we can only guess at what epidemics of disease will look like as the world warms.
Perhaps surprisingly, temperature differences between vastly different types of climates is small: About 7 Celsius degrees separate today's climate from the climate that Earth experienced during the depths of the last ice age. That is approximately 12 Fahrenheit degrees.
The threat of climate change is that global temperatures will increase at least 2degC (3.6degF), which is about 30% of the increase since the temperatures of the ice age. It will happen in a few decades, instead of thousands of years. Is it reasonable to think that humanity and the environment can adapt to a change of that magnitude in such a short amount of time instead of the millennia that were required in the past? Is that something that we really want to have happen?
Climate change has occurred naturally. What is not natural is the speed with which it is happening now:
When global warming has happened at various times in the past two million years, it has taken the planet about 5,000 years to warm 5 degrees. The predicted rate of warming for the next century is at least 20 times faster. This rate of change is extremely unusual. (Quoted from the end of the text in the prior link.)
A good read that conveys the science that explains the reality and consequences of global warming is a recent article by Bill McKibben -- one of the founders of the environmental organization 350.org -- or, for more depth, his 2010 book "eaarth - making a life on a tough new planet." Both are an accessible collection of facts and analysis on the subject of the warming world.
The major corporate oil and gas producers -- such as ExxonMobil -- have finally acknowledged the reality of global warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions, especially as they are produced by fossil fuel use. Royal Dutch Shell goes so far as to state support for "government-led carbon 'pricing' mechanisms." Though more could be expected of these companies, they at least recognize the reality and threat of global warming, and that fossil fuel consumption is a direct cause of that warming (if their public statements are to be believed).
Constantly increasing temperatures have very tangible effects on the world that we live in. Glaciers and ice covers are melting in ways that they have never melted before; those natural storehouses of fresh water supplies, once thought to be permanent, are disappearing. Wildlife is changing its natural rhythms and patterns of habitation as it adapts to environmental changes caused by increasing temperatures. Some are threatened and could be exterminated.
The ocean's levels are rising, thereby reducing the amount of nearby dry land and enabling salt water intrusion into fresh water aquifers; low-lying islands and coastlines are disappearing. By absorbing atmospheric carbon dioxide, the oceans are becoming more acidic -- as they also absorb and store heat from the atmosphere that is eventually released into hurricanes and typhoons -- which threatens aquatic life, including that which is used for human sustenance.
People respond to this in some pretty weird ways. For example, in a head-in-the-sand moment a few years ago, the Republican-led North Carolina state senate vainly tried to legislate out of existence the use of terminology related to increasing sea levels so as to artificially preserve coastal real estate values. The Atlantic Ocean paid no attention to the North Carolina state senate.
NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) provide a wealth of explicit temperature readings covering more than the last century that document increasing temperatures; in-depth research on an impressively-wide spectrum of related topics is available from the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia. Common among these, and other, sources is evidence of a trend of increasing temperatures.
Graphs and charts are handy ways to see these trends. They take raw data and make it visual. For the do-it-yourselfer (including skeptics) NOAA provides a great graphing tool that anybody can easily use. Taking a few moments to make the appropriate selections, I created this graph that shows the world's land temperature trends as determined by annual anomalies that are either above or below the average temperature:
Here's another one that shows the temperature trend for the contiguous United States:
Thanks to the internet, scientific evidence on these subjects is readily available. Significant conclusions that can be drawn from this evidence include:
- Earth's overall temperature was relatively stable for several thousand years after the end of the last ice age; human civilization has developed and flourished during that period of temperature stability.
- Industrial development and higher global temperatures -- happening at the same time, year after year, for two centuries -- cannot be dismissed as an unfortunate coincidence. (Two events happening together once or twice might be a coincidence; if they continue to happen that way, how can it continue to be a coincidence?)
- Human activities, such as the use of fossil fuels (increasingly consumed as a result of industrial development) release huge amounts of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere, and these gases -- especially carbon dioxide, which can linger for thousands of years -- are known to cause our planet's surface temperatures to increase. That is the so-called "greenhouse gas effect."
- Human civilization has become dependent upon certain predictable and beneficial recurring weather patterns (temperatures, rainfall and snowfall) in determining where to live and how to sustain life; those patterns will be disrupted as the planet warms and Earth's climate changes.
- These disruptions will cause global shifts in populations, wealth and power. People will naturally move to be where the living is better. Power will shift to those nations that show the most effective leadership in dealing with the climate-caused disruptions.
- Rejection of the scientific evidence for global warming caused by human activities is too often the result of misrepresentation inspired by political dogma, such as this one which correctly references a NASA study as saying that upper atmosphere carbon dioxide reflects the sun's heat energy, and then amazingly and irrationally concludes that carbon dioxide must therefore cool Earth's surface (think about that for a moment -- if a mirror reflects when pointed in one direction, then it will reflect when pointed in any direction, and atmospheric carbon dioxide in the quoted NASA press release is like a mirror pointing both away from the globe and back into it).
- To the extent that it is human-caused, the climate problem can be human-fixed.
- The threats, costs and consequences of unaddressed global warming are far more dangerous to western civilization than are any threats from terrorism -- climate change has the ability to strike at the foundations of civilization, and it will do so with impunity as long as we allow it to gain power and strength by feeding off the byproducts of civilization's success.
How to fix the problem? At the moment, we seem to have many solutions but not enough action. Last December's Paris Agreement on climate change is a good step in the right direction by the world's governments. But its certainty of success is hard to measure since it depends on voluntary compliance. China is the biggest atmospheric polluter, followed by the United States. Leadership will have to come from both countries.
China, with its centralized government that places a priority on social stability among its huge national population, is likely to be seen as a world leader in this regard, if only because of the self-interest of its ruling class. That country's coal consumption peaked in 2014 and has continued to decline with the implementation of centrally-planned policies that favor non-polluting (or less-polluting) power production. Single-party governing can make things happen in ways that democracy cannot.
American leadership is hampered by the politics of democracy and by money from the fossil fuel lobby. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the twenty top campaign contributors from the Oil & Gas Industry during 2015 and 2016 have made almost all of their contributions to Republicans and conservative groups. These contributions are often in huge amounts: over $9 million from Koch Industries; over $4 million from Chevron; fourteen of the twenty chipped in a million or more. Of the total, only about $350,000 went to Democrats.
Based on the statements of the Trump campaign and the Republican Party platform, future American domestic and foreign policies ought to reject the convincing scientific evidence of global warming. A President Trump would pull out of the Paris Agreement, if only through ignorance. Such an action would be seen as an American-inflicted major wound on an agreement involving most of the world's nations, and would create a global leadership vacuum which China would be more than happy to occupy. Since the rest of the world is convinced that global warming is a major threat, the end result could only be damaging to America's foreign affairs.
By comparison, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton responded to a Scientific American query about climate change with a set of actions and measurable milestones that she proposes for her presidency. (See item #3 here.)
If the Paris Agreement is a worthy start -- and it is -- then how else do we go about fulfilling it?
One way is to use marketplace pricing mechanisms, as alluded to by Shell. That could mean imposing a steadily increasing price on carbon, as championed by organizations such as Citizens' Climate Lobby. The CCL proposal would return the monies collected from the carbon fee to households -- because they are the ones who pay for it, they should get the money back. In their words, such a carbon price would be "revenue neutral."
California uses a "cap and trade program" for pricing carbon. This type of program levies the direct price of carbon on the corporate source, rather than the individual consumer. The World Bank has sponsored the Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition to enable joint efforts among private enterprise and public policy in effectively pricing carbon and greenhouse gas emissions.
And what about all that atmospheric and marine carbon dioxide that will hang around causing problems for thousands of years? That is a question not only about the amounts that we have already deposited, but also the additional amounts yet to come because fossil fuel consumption will be with us for many more years. Private enterprise can be innovative, and innovation should be a source of capabilities to reduce and remove carbon pollution.
A just-released study based on data provided by Rystad Energy -- an oil and gas consulting firm -- provides an analysis that conveys a sense of urgency about the need for tangible, meaningful actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. McKibben of 350.org clearly explains (in an article here) why this means that exploration for, and development of, new fossil fuel sources should cease. Our remaining fossil fuel energy needs, he says, can be supplied by existing oil wells, gas fields and coal mines; no new ones are needed, and, in fact, new ones will create more harm than good.
Nobody wants to pay more than necessary for anything, especially fuel, which powers our transportation, and heats and cools our residences and other buildings. But protection from threats and damage repair always comes with a price tag.
One thing else is always true: The sooner the work begins, the lower will be the total price in the long run.
