Obviously no.
1
We have the brains and the will.
But do we have the spondulicks?
Unless you’re a preindustrial hunter-gather you are the problem.
1
Survey says!: Doomed.
We ARE doomed already
Please don't let there be reincarnation. . . . .
I'm concerned about the state of science education in government:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/jun/07/trump-moon-is-part-of-mars-tweet-nasa
Unfortunately, stupid politicians won't allow money for the projects.
aerosol to block old Sol, eh?
Why not an "umbrella" in space instead. Meaning some sort of curtain, venetian blind or such between us and the fireball, one that cuts insolation by a per cent or whatever to not merely prevent a rise but get us back to "normal".
Geometry says the size of the umbrella would be much smaller than the dimension of Earth. The same tech projected to plant people on Mars would make the umbrella project practicable, with a far bigger pay off. & what do we do if the chemicals we spray in the stratosphere have "unintended consequences".
Unfortunately, any stop gap would probably invite more delay in engaging the real solution- quit burning carbs. And as the manifesto put it back in '89, once India and China drive like we do the fate of the planet is sealed.
Please watch Agent Smith’s soliloquy during interrogations of Morpheus in the movie “The Matrix”.
And add more good news:
Key Greenland glacier growing again after shrinking for years, NASA study shows
https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/key-greenland-glacier-growing-again-after-shrinking-years-nasa-study-ncna987116
This is a satire, right?
2
We certainly aren’t going to built walls to keep out warm water when we won’t even built one to keep out migrants and criminals.
The answer to your question is obvious and should be clear to you by now.
The apocalyptic hopelessness on display in this comment thread helps to drive the problem of climate change and impedes the exploration of mitigating solutions. Facts tell but stories sell, and we're not going to bring the electorate on board with a story of hopelessness. It's a non-starter for most folks; they will disengage at best and, at worst, ricochet to the other extreme, denialism.
Most disheartening (and destructive) are those few who liken humans to parasites, who hold up a naive ideal of Pristine Earth and view human life in opposition to that ideal. What's the logical conclusion here? I'm a humanist. I'm not ashamed to say I value human flourishing.
The doomers would do well to read Charles Mann's latest book The Wizard and the Prophet, in which he explores the dueling philosophies of William Vogt (the prophet, father of environmentalism) and Norman Borlaug (the wizard, father of the Green Revolution in agriculture). It's essentially about the tension between conservation and innovation. Vogt's perspective is clearly winning out here, as the doomers dismiss Jon Gertner's Borlaugian article. Which is a shame, as both perspectives will be critical to addressing climate change.
7
The root cause of climate change is there are too many people on the planet. We cannot fix it if we continue to double the earth’s population every 50 years or so.
3
Philosophizing may be essential at first, and psychologizing second, with politicking third, but now is the time for action: All good men and women must come to the aid of their sickened planet. I can't, and won't, give up on my grandkids or yours.
What can we do specifically to stop the problem, at a personal, community, national, and global level?
1. Walk if possible. Ride a bike. Use public transportation. Figure out a way to travel less.
2. Stop buying plastics when possible. Do you really need a new phone every year or two? An even bigger TV?
3. Set thermostats at 68 degrees in winter, 78 in summer. (Yes, it's uncomfortable.)
4. Eat more natural, not packaged, fruits and vegetables, less red meat, or none at all. Forgo fast food.
5. Recycle as much as possible.
6. Strive to be paperless at home or in the office.
7. Vote for and support eco-friendly politicians.
8. Join local environmental groups. They need to sprout up like churches did in their beginnings.
9. Talk about the problem, as you are here. Spread the word. It's critical and helpful.
10. Keep hope alive. Don't make the dire predictions a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Obviously, I don't have many great new ideas or suggestions, but I welcome yours.
The journey of a thousand miles begins beneath your feet.
"Surrender, sir? Why, I've not yet begun to fight."
-- John Paul Jones, an American in a very tough spot
3
The problem lies not with our intelligence as humanity. The problem lies not in our evolving knowledge. The problem lies with the current technology of our politics and percieved ethnicity and religion. The inherent technology of our current capitalism and population growth are the biggest ultimate drivers of climate change. We could do it, will we?
2
This article reminds me of a joke told by a duPont nuclear
engineer in 1970: Q: "Why did the nuclear engineer defecate
on the living room floor?" A: "He was confident science would find a way to clean it up."
However, I'm not worried about the planet. It has survived
assaults as vigorous as ours. The cyanobacteria, for instance, poisoned their world with their waste product, oxygen, which
made it nicer for us. We're not the first species to foul its nest
with its waste.
But the biology and geography of the planet will change drastically, and future conflicts over territory and scarce resources like fresh water will make current fights over immigration seem trivial.
There's no will to change by people being enriched by exploitation of fossil fuels. They're the people in charge, and the little people who will pay the biggest price are brainwashed. Just ask Trump and his brainwashing crew at Fox news when things will change.
Do I care? I'm 79, and lived a very pleasant life in the former
constitutional democracy called the United States of America.
1
Oh, we’re doomed. On the tombstone of humanity, we can thank the likes of Mitch McConnell, Charles and David Koch, Donald Trump and the entire Republican Party. They did not start our death spiral, but they certainly placed the final nails in our coffin. But hey, it was worth it for a few bucks shaved off the Koch Bros. tax returns, right?
1
Global warming is the new religion of the left. They are on a mission to stop it at all costs regardless of the fact that we still don't know whether it is actually caused by humans, or what its effects are. When I heard one of the Euro politicians on the radio list it as the top issue I knew the liberals had gone completely nuts. We face an existential threat from China, a totalitarian dictatorship trying to take over the world, the European economies are on the verge of recession, and these geniuses from Cloud-cuckoo land are fixated on climate change. Will China, India, and the rest of them be partaking in draconian measures that hamstring their economies? Unlikely. As far as spraying aerosols to manipulate the environmemt, odds are you will end up doing more damage than good, solving one problem and creating several others.
And who, pray tell, is going to pay for "a 100-meter-high wall could be built across the five-kilometer-wide fjord in front of the Jakobshavn glacier in western Greenland to block the warm ocean currents that have been melting it." Mexico?
1
This article is missing one of the biggest points with regard to climate change. We need to stop using fossil fuels. Full stop. Everyone. Everywhere. We need to start consuming less. Period. As soon as possible. None of these technofixes will matter one whit without that.
4
How about recycle plastic into giant fake floating ice sheets- grooved on the bottom to allow air passage beneath- and a reflective white surface on the top to reflect solar radiation back into space...wait, isn't this what the polar regions used to do?
Look, slowing down now is meaningless. If you slow down from a 100 mph to 60 mph you're only a little bit less dead when you hit the brick wall.
We have to start an international Manhattan project project to capture and convert CO2 to O2 and C. We need to get started before 10% of the GDP goes to storm repairs and we need to operate so that we reduce CO2 not keep up with what we're putting in year-by-year.
It's up to the citizens of the world. If you give us engineers the money we can do it. If you let the rich run things we're all doomed. So, are they, but I wonder if they're smart enough to know that: probably not, based on what I see.
2
Banning scientific consideration of global warming past 2040 is a hint as to the age and moral stance of the one doing the Bannon (get it?).
I like to separate the idea that CO2 emissions heat the troposphere from the idea that global warming is a scheme to centralize power. One idea is true and important, while the other is only partly true.
Call me a centrist, but I think the solution to problem #1 doesn't depend on accepting #2. Equating or confusing the two ideas is attractive only to a small number, and harmful to the rest of us.
The hubris and folly of unintended consequences associated with these so-called "brainy" plans are stunning. This reminds me of the 1950's when we thought we could control the weather before we actually understood it. Ice-9? We work hard to observe and model the climate system. It's an incredible challenge. The idea that we understand the system well enough to engineer our way out of a crisis and that the solutions would work at scale with no unintended consequences is not only false hope, it is silly.
2
The time to act is 200 years ago.
2
We must control population if we are ever going to control global warming.
2
We so far have not slowed down climate change, and will fail to reverse much of the damage going forward, precisely because of our brains. We humans are too smart for our own good: too competent in our use -- and greater abuse -- of the earth's natural resources.
In this, all other animal species have a significant advantage over us because their brains are neither wired for Knowledge (of how to exploit natural resources) nor Apathy (for refuting, rather than reforming, these destructive tendencies).
If God truly exists, He must wonder why he made our knees and hips so creaky, and our minds so foolish.
1
The solution is both extraordinarily simple and extraordinarily complex.
The simple solution is one everybody denies is possible, yet it is our only hope.
A radical shift in consciousness. When we viscerally experience the reality that the universe is an inseparable unity, we immediately will change **all** our actions - from the moment we awaken till we shift into the altered states we refer to superficially as "dream" and "sleep."
We will immediately adjust our child bearing habits so as to lead to ideal population. We will immediately adjust our energy use, food intake, etc so as to lead to ideal conditions to slow and ultimately stop human-caused climate change.
Can't happen?
Then you think we're doomed.
But it doesn't have to be all or nothing.
Best of all possible worlds would be "both" "and."
Embark on a world campaign to recognize what it would take to trigger this profound shift of consciousness, what the Buddha called "a radical turning about in the deepest seat of Being."
Simultaneously, create an environment (political, artistic, "spiritual-whatever-that-means-to-you," economic, scientific, architectural, etc) which most fully encourages, inspires and facilitates this radical shift.
And - assuming we can do 3 things at once - continue with what Mr. Gertner and everyone else is suggesting.
it will work.
it is the only thing that will work.
Either we're doomed, or we will do this.
We will do this.
We've known about this for forty years. I look back and see how the warnings were co-opted by the Koch network and of course, the Oil & Gas industry along with a staggering amount of willfully ignorant Americans. One party shredded everything and the other played too nice. We of course clapped from the stands or turned away.
Everything with us is always a game, an amusement, something to be 'saved' - a term which implies that we have control, or something to be fixed by a tech bro. Right now venture capitalists don't see the ROI. How sick is that?
I feel like Charlie Brown when his tiny Christmas tree couldn't take the weight of an ornament and he cried, "Oh, I've killed it." We did, we killed our home.
There is no doubt that we could solve our environmental problem. We have shown we are more interested in our right to be stupid than to be smart. If we have not shown the interest to save our planet up till now what make you think we will in the future?
Read "The Age of Sustainability"
Omigod this is such a frustrating article
‘
Three points:
1 author suggests solutions - but because of the scale of the problem - it requires huge dollars and scale beyond any conceivable reality (we can’t agree on targets across the G20, let alone spend trillions of dollars)
2 each suggestion has no reality grounded in the complex knock-on effects of us humans messing with the earth to compensate for our dumb carbon dumping in the atmosphere - block a fjord of warm water; then what happens?
3 do not use the lead case study to give us hope. Don’t. Stop it. I can mention acid rain, particulate pollution (smog), ozone depleting chemicals as successes, but these pale in comparison with carbon balance in the atmosphere. Importantly, each had a solution based on maintaining our wasteful lifestyles - just purify or switch the chemical vs reduce it
You are not grounded in science or mass balances at all and it bothers me to no end - I welcome a dialogue, because you are dangerous in hope giving.
Identifying the problem is not at all a path to fixing it
Fixing requires a fundamental shift in the way humans consume energy/materials against the global population increases and developing world march for development or more carbon per capita usage
3
"To make matters worse, the Trump administration’s recent efforts to ignore a fact-based, scientific approach — rejecting, for instance, the use of computer projections to assess how a warming world might look after 2040 — leads me to worry that climate denialism is moving from the scientific fringes to the institutional center."
It might be good to explain how computer projections are fact-based.
The author is not incorrect in his assessment that indeed we gained a tremendous amount of knowledge about what are the atmospheric cancer causes and its consequences. His conclusion, however, that technology will fix things by dealing with the aftermath is misleading. Problems don’t age well, learning how to live with it is not a solution. A better dialogue would be around how technology and better design can address the root causes. If we can design for addiction, overconsumption, and higher quarterly earnings, why couldn’t we design for a better world? We need changes in policies and incentives. #newgreendeal
",But in the end, it’s technology that will save us, not only because it can but also because it will have to."
Well, the literature, popular and engineering, is repleat with similar statements. Techno twitism, hubris, pie-in-the-sky, or if wishes are horse beggars would ride? A far better Anchorage in reality may prove useful.
It has to be said, that your POTUS would make much of this article--for his own ends!
Luckily for us all, you have elected a leader who is not inclined to read -though it also has to be said that the POTUS should, ideally, be directed towards more scientific analysis than fanciful essays such as this mostly represents .
It's infuriating that so many humans take it AS THEIR RIGHT to live as destructively as they want, with zero thought for the consequences and with a blithe faith in The God Science to fix everything.
It is time to realize that living beyond one's means, whether economically or ecologically, is not in any way desirable or admirable; it's time to retrench. Americans use about 4x as much energy per capita as people in other industrialized nations with high standards of living, so clearly changing the way we do things isn't going to force us into a life of cave-dwelling deprivation.
Yes, considering that the humans who *do* have foresight are never the ones who get elected here, it is -- I guess -- not terrible that scientists are looking at solutions. But ffs, wouldn't it just be easier, and saner, and cheaper, for every American to understand that this type of over-spending is insane, must stop, and won't lead to deadened living on Earth?
To near-quote GB Shaw, "Science never finds a solution to one problem w-o creating ten more." Or: Law of unintended consequences. Or: Side effects to all remedies. As in: New neato-gizmos should not be the solution; green energy, plant-based diets, and reduced consumerism are.
1
if we can come to some agreement to use technology to cool the planet, it will be like having a thermostat on the earth. Now we all comment and complain at times about the weather, but we all accept it for what it is, mother nature. once somebody, some unknown hopefully altruistic, all knowing being figures out how to manipulate the climate, the weather will then become a political and economic issue of contention. guess that's better than extinction, but not really looking forward to that scenario.
I loved this article. It helped assuage that nagging feeling that we face the real possibility of the collapse of civilization in the next century. Since our descendants probably face millennia of making lemonade from all of our lemons, it was a nice "count your blessings" reminder that whatever happens: we're not going quietly, we've got a huge bag of tricks, and we'll use every trick there is to get through this. AND: leadership matters. We're just going through a rough patch right now.
3
"Maybe we're not doomed after all" and maybe we are. Perhaps, later in our future, if we have one, we might ask ourselves how it ever got to the point where this was the question we asked ourselves. Because getting to this point, where maybe we're doomed and maybe we're not doomed, made certain people a whole lot of money. Gigantic piles of the stuff. The kind that buys governments. The kind that can declare fossil fuel to be 'molecules of freedom' and half the population will weep for patriotic joy at how perfect that sounds.
1
You claim: “Almost certainly, these tools, if used wisely, could keep global average temperatures from rising 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, or 2 degrees Celsius, from a preindustrial baseline.”
Happy-talk nonsense. It’s over. Human civilization is in its death spiral. “Positive” feedback in what we’ve begun will do us in.
The CO2 we’ve already placed up there will stay there warming for 1000 years.
In climate-warming, positive feedbacks such as bright-ice-to-dark-water will keep our Earth absorbing more heat from the sun.
In biodiversity, elimination of species will keep eliminating more species that depended on those that are gone.
And most ironic of the feedbacks, worsening conditions will keep driving more human migration, to which our species responds with racial hatred, choosing the worst among us as leaders just when the “solutions” you write of require the best.
Our politicians promising "green" babble empty rhetoric about 100% of this and 0% of that in some future year, and devote most of their attention to other issues -- the equivalent of rearranging deck chairs as the ship of conditions for human life on Earth goes down.
The only question that remains to deserve our attention is: “What should we leave behind?” -- for the few of our descendants who may survive, or for some other species that may evolve or arrive in the future.
7
Marion Anderson noted, “There never was a war that was not inward.” Our environmental challenges are similarly inward. Too many people are being lead to believe that we can flee knowing our essential self (individually and collectively) while externalizing solutions in technological fixes.
Faith in technology will not solve species extinction, habitat destruction and loss, over population, greed, pride, fear and using other life forms as means to some economic end.
2
Everyone who commutes to work with fewer than 4 passengers in their car can drive a Prius, everyone in a cold climate can accept a temperature in their home and workplace of 66 degrees, and in a warm climate 76 degrees. We can build light rail that runs on electricity in the 25 largest cities and a high speed train network that connects Boston, NY, Washington DC, Atlanta and Miami on the East Coast and Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, LosAngeles, San Diego on the West Coast. Similarly Chicago, Minneapolis and St Louis can be linked up. Total cost about 2 years of the current military budget Trump Tax Cut. Done. Nothing fancy required at all. Just need the will - we have the way.
4
One way to address the problem of climate change caused by humans is to reduce the growth of the human population.
Do we have politicians in the U.S. who are supportive of reducing the birth rate? Clearly not enough.
Supporting good sex education, increasing the availability of contraceptives, giving women more power in societies, and keeping open the option of abortion would all make it easier to meet the challenge of climate change.
4
Even if we, somehow, halt climate change by massive engineering interventions, that will not address the worldwide degradation and depletion of natural systems that support humans and other life. Climate change is only one dimension, and perhaps not even the most important one, of the unsustainable character of our civilization.
4
I was in a grocery store parking lot in Bangor, Maine this morning waiting for someone. I stood outside the car and watched as all the huge trucks and SUVs came and went.
We have 5% of the world's population and we create 25% of greenhouse gasses. We are leaderless in this realm. Trump and the Republicans certainly will not lead us off fossil fuels and the DNC just told Jay Inslee that, no, there will not be one of the twelve debates dedicated to Climate Change, end of story. We are leaderless.
We're in a very, very deep hole and I don't believe we can, technologically, climb out. Brazil's new Trumpian leader is cutting down the Amazon right at this moment. We are killing our oceans. We are destroying our air. And we are leaderless.
If only we had listened to Jimmy Carter who put solar panels on the White House, turned down the thermostat and put on a sweater and asked the rest of us to do the same. We laughed at him. Ronald Reagan promptly took down the solar panels and turned up the heat. George Bush was appointed president by a Republican Supreme Court and Al Gore was not and that made all the difference. That was the end, right there. Obama tried but McConnell was the Grim Reaper and his executive actions are being rolled back by Trump. And we remain leaderless.
11
“So, as much as we may be asking whether technology will save us, that’s the wrong question.”
The author may have failed at math. TECHNOLOGY IS NOT MAGIC.
The above quote is actually just one of correct questions. Weaning off fossil fuels will take around 100 years if we start now as a planet. The questions on energy density/energy return/ intermitancy on renewables, carbon capture that does not exit, materials requirement and energy distribution with close to 8 billion people will not be solved by a technology meme.
The real news: Any future energy source is going to be more limited, expensive and difficult to distribute. Fossil fuels just win on all those counts. Physics just won't quit.
The law of unintended consequences will limit the use of geoengineering as there is little data on the efficacy of any of the interventions on the planet. Adjusting climate on a global scale cannot be reduced the promise of technology.
Might as well release the cane toads again.
2
If we’re concerned about potential devastation from Earth being struck by a large asteroid, then we engineer a solution to deal with a large incoming asteroid. We don’t try to change the trajectory of Earth around the Sun to avoid the asteroid. That would be too difficult. But that’s kind of like what climate scientists have been suggesting we do with respect to climate change.
1
How will this plan work of the nations of the world do not work together for its implementation. Nations are unlikely to stop developing or beggar themselves at our suggestion.
3
I kept wondering why I found this article disturbing. I read all the comments. I think it is the 'scientific hubris' that one commentator so aptly labeled this approach espoused in the article. The other is, if we as human inhabitants of this earth, have not done enough so far, then what would motivate us to do what is suggested here? Panic? Then it is too late. Let's be more motivated to get decent leaders -- I mean people who actually lead and listen to their constituents to lead us toward renewable energy, to ween us off fossil fuels...etc. However, in the U.S. we really, really like our air conditioning, our cars, our conveniences. I believe that being said it is the economically challenged folks, who live currently live without such conveniences who will lead the way in living with this climate crisis. They will know how to adjust and adapt because they are practiced at it. Us spoiled folks will just keep whining, refuse to simplify. We will be pulled away from our addiction to convenience and behave like a child whose mom took away their ice cream.
This is a consciousness problem, not solved by technology.
5
What we should be doing is taking practical measures to reduce the effects of climate change on human populations rather than trying to tame nature. No scientist can’t tell us where and when a flood might happen. But, we can use engineering techniques to protect people for if and when a flood occurs. That’s what we should be doing.
I rewatched Orson Welles' "The Magnificent Ambersons" (1942) last night and heard Eugene (Joseph Cotten), an early automobile inventor, utter the following: "With all their speed forward, automobiles may be a step backward in civilization. It may be that they won't add to the beauty of the world or the life of men's souls. I'm not sure. But automobiles have come. And almost all outward things are going to be different because of what they bring. They're going to alter war and they're going to alter peace. And I think men's minds are going to be changed in subtle ways because of automobiles. And it may be that...in ten or twenty years from now, if we can see the inward change in men by that time, I shouldn't be able to defend the gasoline engine but would have to agree with George: that automobiles had no business to be invented." Yep. But good luck getting us to let go of our comforts and conveniences, our food flown in from distant continents so we may enjoy berries out of season, our wish to visit the very places our visiting is destroying.
4
You want to slow climate change, at least that which can be attributed to humans? Stop over populating the world; especially in areas where resources are limited - e.g. CA, India, Africa, Middle East, NYC, etc. etc. Carbon taxes will do nothing, especially as they will not be entertained by the most populous countries that have no regulations.
5
Jerry Kramer was a famous Vince Lombardi devotee and Green Bay Packers player.
As part of his induction to the NFL Hall of Fame, he shared what he learned from Lombardi and applied to his personal life:
"You can. If you will."
The question is for Americans is do we will?
If so, we can do it.
Of that I am super confident...our ingenuity and latent "can-do" attitude can make it happen.
We just need to do it over the obstructions of president trump. And the apathy of the Republicans in Congress and in some of the states.
But even with those hurdles, we can do it. If we will.
4
Could it be that a minority of voters in the U.S. effectively sealed the entire world's fate at the time of humanity's last real opportunity to avoid disaster, by placing our environmental protection efforts in the hands of those who oppose them or deny the need for them?
Yes, it could--and likely did.
9
@Diogenes
We don't have to allow but it means not being sheep anymore in a system that is killing us.
As expected, the comments mostly denounce the article because it prescribes something other than simply being virtuous and abstain from emitting CO2. The left is really similar on this topic to the Christian Right's attitude on sex, contraception and abortion. They demand abstinence. Using contraception would mean condoning casual sex which is deemed sinful, so it is forbidden. But of course abstinence is against human nature, so this doesn't work and we get unwanted pregnancies and abortions.
Radical emission reductions are quite the same: Completely unrealistic. World population is exploding and billions are only just beginning to enjoy modern civilization. Even if per capita emissions could be reduced, total emissions will continue to rise. That is simply a fact, denial doesn't help. People will always choose their personal living standard over a big but abstract menace that has no direct discernible connection to their individual actions.
And that is why technology - active counter-measures - is the only hope. We'd better start investing a lot more funding in research in that direction. But environmentalists of course won't have it. If we don't stop sinning, according to them, we should perish.
2
@GS: I disagree with you. Progressives would use technology for sure - but who's going to pay for these incredibly expensive solutions? Not Republicans! Maybe you better go talk to those who absolutely do not wish to be taxed one penny more for anything and billionaires who contribute mightily to the problem but not to the solution.
5
whizbang technology is not the solution. political leadership, electing the right candidates is not the solution. individual human behavior is the solution.
people who have been convinced by the climate science need to raise their voices, inform others, adapt their daily routines, change their consumption behavior and retrofit their homes to mitigate climate change -- and in that way lead by example.
the momentum of the carbon energy infrastructure is enormous. but the mass is in the people and in their energy demands. it's the attitudes, much more than the technology, that needs innovation.
There have always been people screaming the sky is falling over some issue of the time. Thanks so much for providing this perspective on perhaps the greatest challenge of this particular moment. True that humans are responsible for much environmental damage. Equally true that they can solve those problems well before they destroy the planet.
3
Let's work with what we have. It is parsimonious, if nothing else. It would be awful for the makers of plastic bags to outlaw single use products, such as grocery bags, but very do-able. Ireland did it years ago. The community I live in did it. Using canvas bags allows for fewer trips from the car to the house as more items can be carried in them.
Public transportation - very cheap or free as the Netherlands does. It would get cars off the road, eliminate the need for ever more parking garages and their expense, and be a tremendous help to young people, elders who no longer drive, people living in poverty who are stretched thin by the cost of transportation, and people stressed by driving. Most of us, in short, would benefit while cutting emissions. It would also reduce the extraction of aluminum and other resources used in the auto industry as fewer families would need two cars.
Reduce/eliminate environmentally (and public health) destructive industrial farming with its toxic pesticides and antibiotics. We would eat healthier food and preserve the pollinators on which food production depends while having the side benefit of cleaner water.
There are many more things we could do now. The problem comes back to campaign financing distorting what politicians feel comfortable legislating - regardless of what we both want and need.
1
Garbage in/garbage out. First & foremost stem all waste.
Building stock, which accounts for 40% of our carbon footprint, can be made 25% more efficient using 30yrs-old technology. Trillions saved in operating costs that covers the capital costs while producing hundreds of thousands of jobs that cannot be outsourced or done robotically.
We can't even scrape enough together to fix rusting infrastructure; so we're are we going to get the money to build 100' high, 5km wide walls in front of remote glaciers?
2
Thank you for this--one detail of aerosol use that needs to be considered is that adding sulfur to the atmosphere risks sulfuric acid falling to earth and making the oceans and land dangerously acidic.
2
I believe that there is climate warming and that it has already affected our way of life and comfort. When I was a kid in the Bronx I recall the miserably hot summers in the early 1950s. In about 1955 we moved upstate to Glens Falls/Lake George in the Adirondacks. We moved in January and it was bitterly cold and the ground was covered in snow. The deep cold could begin in September/October and snow was possible at the end of the October, certainly by Thanksgiving. Ice stayed on the lakes until April/May. In the summer we slept with blankets and kept the windows open to allow the fresh cool air to circulate. It's been many years since then. Now winters upstate aren't as long or cold. There isn't as much snow and summer, well, its just strange. At night it's cool but I believe the air is now more humid than it used to be. Lake George seems different too.
Now I live in Florida and its far hotter and more miserable here than in the 1960s when I visited with grandparents. Last winter was long and cold. We get one extreme and then another. The gradual change of seasons is not the same anymore.
I don't think we're doomed right now but I do believe life will be different. We'll migrate to better climates and those left behind will endure. But it's the flooding, affects on crops, the oceans and everything else combined that will eventually alter our behavior or hasten our extinction. We'll adapt, change or die. I think millions will starve and others will thirst. We are doomed.
6
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, an organization of the top scientific minds in the world, founded by former Manhattan Project scientists who regretted what they did, is pretty clear: geo-engineering is more dangerous than people realize.
Take the opening graphic's atmospheric sulfate particle injection technology. Yes, it's fairly easy to do and relatively cheap, and yes, it would stop temperatures from rising while it's active. It's still a horrible idea: 1) the sky will be bleached white from horizon to horizon for the foreseeable future; 2) if it isn't actively maintained and the cover dissipates, temperatures will rebound past where they would have been without it; 3) nearly all rain will be acid rain; 4) we don't know nearly enough about the role the upper atmosphere plays in the biosphere; and 5) it would have to be imposed upon billions of people without their consent.
Optimism has no place in today's Climate Change. It's much too late for optimism. The only rational attitude is near-panic.
6
Finding alternatives to fossil fuels for energy is one of those areas for which technological research has not been very successful. Nuclear fusion was supposed to produce virtually limitless free energy but it hasn't happened. There are no good energy alternatives for planes and large ships. Only after decades since the invention of PV solar panels has is tis technology beginning to play a significant role. It is also only recently that wind turbines are playing a big role. For a long time about 80% of energy has come from burning fossil fuels and that percentage continues. Technological fixes generally look better on paper than they do when attempts are made to employ them and they often cause new problems. The most critical countries are the US, China, and India, which together produce probably a little more than half of all carbon dioxide emissions. Half of all coal is burnt for energy in China which is the largest emitter of greenhouse gases. India is building coal plants to provide electricity as are many other countries. There are about 1.000 coal plants being built or in the planning stage. The US has a president who is promoting fossil fuel production and he is a climate change denier. There should be a greater sense of urgency to act but climate change is such a slow process and requires so much scientific analysis to describe what is occurring that it is difficult for people to actually feel the sense of urgency that is required for sufficient action.
3
Massive reforestation creates millions of jobs and takes tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere. Not rocket science and perhaps too simple for our over-technical approach to everything, it could start very soon as part of the green new deal.
15
@Craig Millett: The Amazon is being cut down faster than any new trees can help. The Amazon is the planet's carbon scrubber. (Let's not even talk about the biodiversity that will disappear with the trees).
2
@Craig Millett. Yes!!! Reforestation is hugely important. And not very difficult.
@sophia
Your point makes no sense. Of course we need to protect the Amazon basin. That in no way diminishes the value of reforestation.
Pumping water to expand glacier sizes seems practical and doable. Adding aerosols to the atmosphere to reflect sunlight from reaching the surface of the planet sounds risky but may be doable. Diverting warm water away from water near glaciers sounds feasible but perhaps very costly.
Unintended consequences associated with big environmental projects on this scale produce large and possibly dangerous risks. If they can be tested on a small scale first then it seems like the right thing to do. Big projects take time - all the while the clock is ticking generating more and more risk for our planet.
Taxing the rich and their corporations that produce the seeds of our current problems seems like the obvious solution for funding these projects since most of the problems have greed at their core. The greedy buy political power and stop any progress on solving the associated environmental problems in the first place. The rich will have no heritage if the planet is ruined in a few short decades. It is in their interest to protect their "assets" -- large scale clean up projects, large scale investments in green technology, and large scale social movements to get away from petroleum based economies. Tax the rich so they can save their money for the long haul. They can afford it, governments have squeezed the rest of us to our limits.
3
Before we start spraying aerosols into the atmosphere, let's ask our scientists to definitively determine the causes of the last ice age. Let's not forget that the entire continent was one giant glacier a mile or more thick, less than 20 thousand years ago. That is a lot of melting, and that has given rise to the 'perfect' conditions we are now hoping to preserve. Ice-age onset is reputedly very fast, so before scientific hubris creates runaway global cooling (amplified by reflective ice, etc. etc.), at least tell us accurately(!) why the planet experiences ice ages.
Can we maintain the earth in its current state?
100% renewable energy and replant forests worldwide! Then start on the fancy-pants solutions (but keep up the research.)
1
If the environment is going to be saved, the One Percent has got to step up to the plate. If you’re a billionaire, there’s no reason your estate shouldn’t be Net Zero; generating its own power, using minimal water, and xeriscaped all around. There’s no reason you shouldn’t invest in forestland in order to protect it, and in cities to make them livable for people. And there’s no reason you should go everywhere oh a private jet that measures fuel consumption in gallons per mile.
.
But most of all, the One Percent has got to stop stretching-thin the working and middle classes. When people are focused on how to provide for their families, they don’t have the time or resources s to fight for the environment.
10
Even if all of Mr. Gertner’s proposed solutions were practicable, they are useless as long as we have an administration that not only doubts global warming, but actively tries to prevent scientists from getting the word out.
6
It's nice to dream. Most of the U.S. government is now committed to doing essentially nothing for the nation aside from ensuring continued bloat of the military and concentrating wealth into fewer and fewer hands. If this weren't discouraging enough, consider that we're expecting the very species that caused this catastrophe to now go out and fix it. This is like expecting a pride of lions to form a social services agency to protect local antelopes and their vulnerable young.
But we can still admire how clever we are, as Mr. Gertner asks us to do. We're so smart, you see, that we'll be fully aware of every unraveling of the biosphere to come, plus what we could have done to address it had we the capacity and desire to do so. Excepting, of course, those who construct competing, obfuscating narratives for the near-term benefit of their companies' ledger sheets.
Calamity is certain, the only question being exactly how bad it will get. A feedback loop is already evident, whereby the gradually accelerating decline of civilization is proportional to the decline of the biosphere. As things get worse, our ability to adapt will decline as well. A person has to be insane, or at least as happily deluded as Mr. Gertner, to have children at this point.
7
Maybe we could spray glyphosate??
Every Republican President since Reagan deep sixed officially sanctioned reports that they or oil companies paid for, all stating the same but with more and more dire fears. That’s fifty years of lies, propaganda and the gathering destruction of the planet at the hands of a political party incapable of separating greed from the future of everybody.
7
Geo-engineering the planet. Fantastic. After all, what could go wrong?
Onwards to 10 billion. Now we can totally dominate the planet: fish out the oceans, mine everything, convert all land to farming, eradicate all unnecessary species and make every square meter or land or sea serve one or another of our purposes. All in the secure knowledge that it is as safe as it is rational.
2
Let me say what everybody thinks, even if it is not said publicly: "The worst of climate change will happen after I have died so I don't really care and don't ask me to pay for it. In the meantime, I will enjoy my house, my air con, my car, my SUV, my babies, my overseas jet vacations."
3
Fargo, ND has yearly average 42F
https://www.usclimatedata.com/climate/fargo/north-dakota/united-states/usnd0115
San Antonio, TX has yearly average 69F
https://www.usclimatedata.com/climate/san-antonio/texas/united-states/ustx1200
The difference is (69-42)*5/9 = 5*27/9 = 15C
The straight distance Fargo to San Antonio is 1,200 miles, with 15C difference in climate.
It gives 1200/15 = 80 miles/degree C.
So if you want to experience a 1C change in climate, drive 80 miles south.
Look around yourself. Are there any humans still alive? Is there endemic disease? Does any food grow at all? Did all the species go extinct?
Now drive back to the safety of your home. If you survived.
You have seen the end of the world…
PS To mend it, give these nice enterprising fellows $30 trillion.
At 60 million US households, that is $500,000 per household, rich or poor. Proportional to income, that would be about $3 million/NY Times reader household.
These $30 trillion are the point of climate control.
The Chinese still build one giant new power plant a week. The idea is that they would be so impressed with us that they stop developing. Instead, today they menaced with dire consequences the US companies which don't give them their best technology.
So the net effect would be zero.
Same for India.
Such are the marvels of climate control.
In the warming which started 250 years ago, so couldn't have been caused by humans.
And sure can't be reversed. More than the spinning of the Earth.
2
@novoad
The surface temperature difference between an ice age and the current interglacial period is about 5C. The planet has seen a 1C change in the last 100 years....or about 20%....that is fast and continuing and not natural. Coming out of the last ice age, a 1C change took 2000 years. So, the planet is in trouble.
Fossil fuels are finite and it will take about 100 years to replace the infrastructure with alternative energy. Since fossil fuels only have about 50 years of viability, the problem from any point of view won't go away.
Even though your post has no basis in fact on what is happening on climate change, try to do the math on energy.
2
@glennmr
"The surface temperature difference between an ice age and the current interglacial period is about 5C."
That is nonsense.
During ice ages Manhattan and everything north of that is covered by thick ice. Vermont is 5C cooler but is not covered by thick ice.
Try again, give a reference when you find it.
"Since fossil fuels only have about 50 years of viability"
That is the nonsense that they always pushed, for 150 years now.
Natural gas as found now in US will satisfy US needs for a century and a half. More will be found and is being found all the time.
1
@novoad
You cited nothing.
Global temperature changes are paramount…not what happens in Vermont. The cycles are shown in the link below with global temps. The global temperature changes are relatively small
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/abrupt-climate-change/Glacial-Interglacial%20Cycles
The proven reserves for the US are about 400 TCF, but consumption is about 27 TCF per year. So, a couple decades. The amount of natural gas in shale has been known for decades with most of it not recoverable...just not published until it was propaganda ready.
US crude oil reserves are about 50 billion barrels and consumption is about 6 billion barrels per year.
The e-koolaid about the US being an energy giant is just a bunch of lies.
None of this means anything without the will and the desire to act. I'm looking at you, Congress, White House, fossil fuels industries . . . . . yeah, I thought so. There's still money to made from dooming us all, so why not?
3
Some form of accelerated carbon capture and storage is the only meaningful technological solution to this problem. We must be able to reduce our atmospheric CO2 levels to levels approaching pre-industrial levels (280 ppm). And we don't have great ways of doing this, not even close. The fossil fuels we're burning today took tens and hundreds millions of years to be stored by natural processes (some of it following global mass extinction events). Good luck replicating that on a human time-scale.
Oddly enough, one of the best solutions I've seen happened to be a completely fictional one: the bioengineering of a lichen that essentially grows on every available surface, spreads throughout the earth, and draws down enough carbon to save humanity (SEE: The Collapse of Western Civilization by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway).
All this talk of rebuilding glaciers and injecting sulfates into the atmosphere feels a bit silly. It's purely stopgap stuff.
100 million years from now, whatever intelligent species have repopulated this planet will study the thin stripe of plastic in the geologic record to solve the puzzle of what caused the great hominid extinction event.
2
I would guess that a future with 8, 10 or 50 billion humans on the earth will change the climate/weather no matter that CO2 is x, y or z ppm in the atmosphere
We're doomed if we don't stop climate change. And yes it's real and all the people with their heads in the sand who refuse to believe it are at just as much risk as the rest of us. No amount of magical thinking is going to fix the droughts, the storms, the floods, the fires, the famines, ocean acidification, starvation until we stop pumping CO2 into the atmosphere. And switch to nuclear power. http://thorconpower.com/
Thank you for this article. I learned of some geoengineering ideas I had not encountered. I notice there is justifiable fear among the commentators that technological solutions may cause their own problems. The biggest one is the moral hazard that might lead to complacency if we know such solutions are possible. We are truly in a pickle. If human civilization collapses we will not be able to implement any remediation. Even if this were accompanied by a terrible reduction in population so that generation of new greenhouse gasses diminished considerably, we would still need to remove carbon. The extinction of the human race (and a lot of more innocent creatures) is definitely a possibility. The scale of the problem is why the Green New Deal is a good idea. So say we can muster the political will to embrace the Green New Deal here in the US and it becomes a global fashion, and we can apply our science and our engineering and our labor and industry to fight climate change, change our lifestyles, mobilize ourselves as though fighting WWIII or an invasion of methane-breathing space aliens. How long will it last? Because the fact that we have not already started addressing climate change is that we individually have ceded our agency in good faith to entities such as governments and corporations that do not always act in good faith, so that often a very small number of human beings have tremendous leverage over the fate of humanity.
3
Geoengineering to reflect sunlight back into space won't stop the increasing CO2 poisoning of the oceans.
Perhaps the super-rich and Bg Oil just think there are too many people? That a climate catastrophe could get rid of 90% of world population leaving them and their heirs in absolute control?
After all who would trade their only planet for money?
6
With the world wide right wing power surge, the path back from disaster becomes ever less likely, even if it is still possible. Even if we couldn’t stop it, we could slow it down if the power brokers and oligarchs were inclined, but they are not.
Living in a beautiful natural settings, every day I look outside, step out the back door, and I am reminded of how much humans have taken for granted and wasted.
But I am just an old woman with a broken heart.
I comfort myself with two thoughts:
1) I will likely die before this planet becomes unlivable.
2) The earth will survive and it will be beautiful again. It’s us who will be gone.
5
What this author offers is hope, and that’s a good thing.
To survive climate change we will need these technologies, as well as many other measures such as energy conservation, reformed agricultural and eating habits, less waste and new technologies and expectations. Our ingenuity offers us a way forward, but only our morality will push us on that way.
I spend many hours each week trying to address climate change by organizing churches, so I hear a lot of climate change denial of all types. The “it’s too late, we’re all doomed” response is just one form, indulged in across the polítical spectrum. It’s a great excuse to sit back and do nothing.
If you’re feeling despair, which is justified, getting involved is the best antidote. Having an opinion, or writing a comment in the NYT doesn’t mean that you’re on the right side. There is much to do, and everyone can make a contribution. Our only hope is you.
2
Please don't write and don't publish such articles. We need the climate change topic to be one of the supreme issues in our battles. We need Green New Deal. We need the conviction that only by defeating Republicans we have a chance to do something about the approaching disaster. Please stop meddling in our fight, please no techno solutions, no debates, no doubts in our rightness. This is just too important.
1
This is feel good nonsense. A call to do nothing
You go to the countries expressing the greatest concerns about climate change and see no meaningful progress. You look at the most liberal US states and they reject a carbon tax, or nuclear energy.
Man resists change. We like today and will try to preserve it. This article which calls for no sacrifice, no money, no anything is just a perfect excuse to do nothing.
2
2:1
For every unit of greenhouse gas (GG) emitted, we need to pull 2 out of the atmosphere. We need to ramp to that ratio over at most 20 years and hold it until we get back to skiable Sierras.
Hard? Not really. If you capture the carbon from burning biomass you get a 2:1. Planting a tree you don't burn is a 50:1 (my estimate). California is now paying other states to take its over production of electricity in the summer. Let's give it to entrepreneurs who capture carbon instead.
We need a simple approach all can understand. With it we will get it done and, in about 40 years, stop breaking a sweat when we shouldn't.
Keep it simple and stupid. KISS GG 2:1
You Bet!
We can tech our way out of this at any time,
so full steam ahead, America.
Just like we did with DDT:
Mosquitos? Solved!
Factory farming?
Antibiotics till the cows come home!
Nuclear waste, well...
Pedal to the metal!
We'll figure it out.
Ain't no problem we can't make worse through
smug assurance that we've got her dialed in.
So buy that gas hog, roll some coal and let the tech guys sort it.
Geoengineers! Mousekateers!
Have no fears....
3
Nothing will be done until it's too late.
Unfortunately for the author, 80% of the time, the brains appear to be focused on doing damage to humanity in the pursuit of money.
1
The solution doesn't have to be so complex. Tap into our tendency towards self-focus; call it greed. Or focus on altruism. Whatever. Demonstrate you're carbon-neutral: no taxes. Demonstrate you're carbon-negative: get a payment. You get the idea. We actually have a couple of relatively recent examples of changing behavior so we know it's possible. 1) Mothers Against Drunk Driving has had a significant impact. Not perfect, but WAY better than it was. Drunk drivers are now at least generally aware how guilty they are. 2) Picking up dog poop. Amazing actually. Look to the examples (Norway.) It does take leadership, but that's a deficit we'll fix soon enough.
1
Do we have the will? No, we're doomed.
2
Oh my goodness, you sound like a gun control advocate. It was never the case that we didn't know how to stave off the coming catastrophe. It was never the case that we didn't have the capability to stave it off, either. It's probably already too late, but the only way to do this is for the wealthy to find a way to make money off of it. Maybe you can think about that.
1
False hope.
Ten million windmills in the arctic. Really? False hope numbs and intoxicates.
Instead we could start by facing the science that tells us that catastrophic climate disruption is here and advancing exponentially. Our fossil fuel enabled lifestyles have gotta go. Consumerism is our sickness. Only mass systemic changes give humanity a chance.
Let’s try a Green New Deal.
77
@Bob Dass
Couldn't agree more!
Vote Dems into Congress and the Presidency and we have a chance.
A Green New Deal is exactly what we need.
5
@Bob Dass
1. We need to quit substituting our opinions for science.
2. Let's also quit diagnosing the problem. Al gore did that and none of the commenters is adding value talking about it.
3. Instead, shift to looking at solutions and understand that fixing climate change is like solving a Rubik's Cube. You need to solve all the sides at once. Difficult but doable.
4. We need to examine the bigger picture and realize there are solutions we're not even talking about. Solar and Wind are not the end of the story.
5. Admit we need a program of efficiently removing carbon from the environment and transforming it into carbohydrates.
6. Forget taking down capitalism, it's here and it's as good as it gets. Start leveraging and regulating it.
8
@Bob Dass
"consumerism is our sickness." Agreed. Our civilizations are based on disposable products and packaging. These consumer civilizations have filled the oceans and land with plastic waste and the atmosphere with greenhouse gasses.
Capitalism does not care about tomorrow, only profit today. It is not sustainable. Their needs to be a citizen revolt against this fatal, greedy way of life.
3
At this point, this techno optimism may be the only thing that we have left.
5
The greatest threat to the long-term survival of our species is uncontrolled population growth. We are currently adding roughly 80 million people to the world each year. That's like adding another Germany to world every twelve months, and the rate of growth is continually increasing. Nearly all of the major problems facing humanity can be attributed to overpopulation, including global warming, pollution, famine, water shortages, energy shortages, housing shortages, shortages of minerals, lumber, and other resources, deforestation, mass extinction, skyrocketing healthcare costs, unemployment, poverty, overcrowded prisons, wars over scarce resources, and much more.
The world is a finite repository of resources that we need to survive, and we are using up those resources at a rate that is growing exponentially. Global aquifers are being pumped 3.5 times faster than rainfall can naturally recharge them. Topsoil is being lost 10-40 times faster than it is formed. Worldwide, we have lost 60% of the vertebrate species since 1970.
If we reduce the global population to one billion or fewer people and maintain that level, we can reclaim lost forest land, reverse decades of environmental destruction, improve the standard of living for all of earth's inhabitants, and unsure the long-term survival of our species. The solution to our most pressing problems doesn't require any new technology and has been with us for decades. We must simply stop having so many babies.
7
@SSG
The population growth rate is not increasing--it's slowing dramatically, from 2.1% a year in the early '70s to 1.2% in 2017.
We do need to slowly reduce population, which has happened and will continue to happen with urbanization, education, prosperity and female equality. (It's called the demographic transition.) But that will only slow the rate of further damage (even as widespread prosperity would likely have a carbon-intensifying effect absent new laws and customs--more steaks, cars, travel). We MUST get to net carbon neutral technology. If we can find cost-efficient ways to remove CO2 from the atmosphere (such as more forests or development of carbon-absorbing building materials) or block some sunlight from reaching earth, that will help a great deal.
The comments here are really depressing. It's either "It's too late, let's curl up and die" or "Don't tell anyone that technology could help us! Then we won't change our evil ways." We're still alive, we have brains, we have free will, we have laws and governments, we have technology. It's not too late until you decide it is.
Tech can help, especially if we make the real decision to change to non carbon energy like solar and wind. But stopping deforestation around the world and actually reforesting, changing mass consumption habits etc will go further.
1
A leading cause of global warming is the relentless flow of hot air issuing from the mouth of President Trump. curbing that major pollutant will immeasurably help in combating climate change.
2
Technological hubris is one of the character failings that got us into this fine mess, and a key feature of this hubris is the idea that we can "tame" Nature, bend Her to our needs, exploit Her assets at will. Is the solution, then, more technology? More vast projects to "tame" nature -- 10 million windmills to pump Arctic seawater, colossal walls to stop glacial icemelt, millions of tons of sulfate aerosols dispersed in the stratosphere?
More to the point, technology doesn't function without energy, cannot be constructed without energy, and to effectively combat climate change we will need to dramatically reduce our consumption of energy. Spinning fantasies of technological mastery is at this point counterproductive. Humility is more in order, and a recognition of the need live more lightly on the earth.
79
@ando arike
I think a possible tech solution is our best hope, if only by virtue of the fact that we've now waited to the last minute of the 11th hour to avert ecosystem collapse. That said, pursuit of a tech solution(s) needs to be part of an all-hands-on-deck approach of behavioral change, renewable energy, and the leadership to make this global challenge our top priority.
1
50 years ago this would make sense. Unfortunately, the author doesn't have enough respect for momentum. We have launched a huge machine in one direction over a long period of time, and there are no brakes big enough to slow it down. So we need to plan for how to survive the coming disaster. Seven billion people will not change their behavior in a meaningful time period. The Paris agreement, however well meaning, can't be successfully implemented.
75
I refuse to give up. Why admit defeat so soon? Where's your American can-do spirit?
Global recognition of the problem and the need to undo it has never been higher. Now is not the time to give up.
At a minimum, every effort made now to reduce the causes of global warming make 'surviving' it easier.
5
Paris was never intended to be the answer, just the first step on a tough journey. Of course, now we are moving backwards.
13
@Dan Barthel
50 years puts us up the rear of making war on ... what?
Jungle bicyclists and rice growers.
Were we but wiser to put more bicycles into our fleets and diverge from industrial corn/bean/hog/cattle monocultures. To not allow 2,4-D to set the last brick of industrial agriculture and make way for Monsanto. Funny thing about that Viet Nam war. The biological war lab boys researching the potential role of the plant growth regulator, 2,4-D, in warfare finally had their day courtesy of the C-130 and the big lab of red rice alley. Such our fates to live out this war on weeds in the industrial landscape of the heartland. And to feed the capture of the sun with fossil.
I appreciate the hopeful tone of this article, but more human tinkering doesn’t seem the logical way to go.
Nature built the biosphere.
The more we study and understand it, the more complex, elegant and finely-tuned it reveals itself to be.
We know the solutions, nature has them.
Rewild.
Reforest.
Refrain from burning every bit of fossil fuel we have retrieved from nature.
Relieve nature of our burden upon it, if only out of self-interest.
108
@Kevin Greene If we could have a huge culling of humans, then the planet would start healing overnight. Since we don't seem to have the initiative, I suppose nature will do it for us.
6
@Kevin Greene If everyone on the planet suddenly decided to only have one child, we could reduce the world population to approx. 2 billion in 100 years. Of course, that's not going to happen, and we have a lot of mouths to feed. So we can't re-wild many areas. We've painted ourselves into a corner.
11
@Bennett
Or half the population have no children and have have 1 (1 billion in 100 years).
Or....
Our first priority must be to vote for a new president and administration. Whether or not we have the ability and knowhow to reverse climate change is not clear, but it's clear that we are currently going in the wrong direction. We must at least follow the right direction.
141
Ultimately, this is why I consider public education the greatest invention of, and the greatest hope for, we humans.
We have to make rational, scientific, long-term thinking part of our culture and that can only happen if we have an electorate that listens to those who deny climate change, and who first laugh at the deniers, then vote them out of office. An educated populace is our only hope, barring Martians zooming in from their part of the Moon.
However, I watched tobacco and alcohol absolutely devastate my parents' and grandparents' generation. They knew they were setting themselves up for cancer, yet it felt good in the short term....so lung cancer, emphysema, and oral cancer were their rewards. I wonder if global warming is the same challenge, people have to understand that the disaster is inevitable, but it will not hit immediately.
Hugh Massengill, Eugene Oregon
78
@Hugh Massengill - the tobacco analogy is a reasonably good one in other regards.
The notion that we can use technology to slow or reverse climate change is somewhat the same as the idea that we can tolerate tobacco use - and the associated illness - because of advances in medical science.
The reality is that slowing climate change - and slowing cancer's growth or spread - is just a secondary and partial remediation. The cost of "responding" is very great as compared to the lower expense of taking preventative steps.
The technological approach to managing or mitigating climate change is also similar to medically treating an illness in that there will be other negative impacts from the response itself.
12
@Hugh Massengill
Totally agree on public education. Note that conservatives also agree, which is why they have made it their mission to dismantle it. They know that a population that has equal education and opportunity mitigates the advantages they use to create and/or keep unearned wealth for themselves.
8
@Hugh Massengill, the fundamental nature of the system encourages the promotion of the worst human beings into economic and political power. If that has not been evident over the past decade, they have been hiding in a cave,
Unless this aspect of human society and socioeconomic system changes, the idea that you can reverse what has been done over the past 100 years is a clever ruse so we can continue to do what we always have: kicking the can down the road (which the Boomers have been wonders at doing since many of our economic, climate and political problems have been known since the 1980s).
At this point, absent a political system that can enforce change or a fundamental change to our economic belief system, it is more likely that natural disasters will be the more likely path that the universe exacts its revenge. Put on your seat belts because it is going to be a rough ride.
5
Welp, all good, but since it’s all decades too late I sure hope all this can be implemented really, really fast and at scale. Otherwise this os just another in a long string of articles trying to assuage folks fears. Nothing much came out of all those other articles either, just further blowing past projections. Everybody still buying huge gas guzzling SUVs, etc., etc., etc.
85
@Matthew
We had F-16s flying low overhead most of the day.
Why is it so taboo to ask about the military's considerable contribution to the CO2 equation ?
20
@irene
It's not, did I say it was??
1
Nice sentiment.
I imagine when the Titanic was half submerged, some passenger was clinging to the idea that the ship would be able to right itself.
117
@MT "Technology can tell us everything--we are sinking!"
4
those hopeful Titanic passengers were all in the posh accommodations of the first class cabins. belowdecks, those in steerage were suffering or already dead, their cries for help muffled by acres of Axminster and centuries of isolating wealth and priveledge.
12
I'm sorry, but at its root, ours is not a technological problem. It's a relational problem and a values problem. No amount of technology can make up for the fact that we've been treating the earth and the biosphere as nothing more than a resource for our use and amusement. The real problem is our attitude of human supremacy and our disrespect for the natural world. Until we adjust our attitude, even the most advanced technology will only delay the reckoning.
246
@goanimal We can start with the pollution problems we are creating. All the small seemingly harmless human activities on a daily basis. The list will not be welcomed by most of us.
1 Plastic bottled water. The carbon cost of manufacturing plastic plus shipping it around the country and the world. (technology can provide clean good drinking water to all.)
2 Plastic packaging for all items. Most of them end up in the oceans. (recycling seems not to work so well.
3 All the though away attitude propagated by corporations to force consumerism. (Creates mountains of electronic and other debris that is creating carbon global warming for little reason except more profit.)
There are many more considerations that will work. Carbon Taxes will do nothing!
8
@goanimal
Can't "adjust" it with 7,700,000,000 of us all trying to survive off of it. Adding 200,000 each day, 70,000,000+ this year.
Recipe for HUGE disaster.
24
@goanimal The worst part, it that the problem is not the majority of humans, but a small fraction. We have wasted a planet to enrich a handful.
Disgusting.
19
It's not just about will. Among the things Gertner doesn't spend much time on in this piece is the amount of resources that would have to be mined, smelted, and transported to accomplish any one of his pet projects, let alone the energy consumed (and presumably carbon released) to build his clever solutions. Physics and chemistry still matter in these discussions, and no opportunity is without a significant cost.
6
While the AGW alarmists continue to cry wolf, staff at Glacier National Park just removed the ‘Gone By 2020’ signage. They are also editing literature that heretofore stated the glaciers would be gone as soon as 2020. Turns out that 2020 is just six months away and the glaciers not only are not gone, they’re growing.
I’m all for sound environmental stewardship. I want clean air, water, and I agree we have a growing solid waste problem with plastics, mostly created by other countries irresponsible waste management. But the planet & Mother Nature are far more in-control than humans. Just look at how nature has reclaimed Chernobyl. The radiation is there and it’s an issue, yes. But you would not know that from the abundance of wildlife that has returned - nature is winning.
Alarmism is irresponsible.
2
You make many good and valid points here but for me one of the biggest obstacles to our collective will to do something about it is our innate conservatism. Generally speaking people aren't going act unless they perceive that there's a clear and present danger and a clear and attractive (or at least not repellent) set of actions we can take that will eliminate or at least mitigate the damage and maybe save civilization.
We're not there yet.
We're not there because there's an entire industry devoted to telling us that there is no such thing as man made climate change and that even if there is there's nothing we can do about it anyway.
We're not there because change is expensive and disruptive. and those of us who believe that our climate is changing are divided between the gloom and doom crowd and the technology will save us all boosters. (I believe that the truth is somewhere between these two extremes)
We're not there because people, not just well to do Americans with their McMansions and SUVs, but people in developing countries don't want to be hot or cold, want to be able to drive where they want when they want and eat high prestige foods such as beef. They want jobs. We need a massive change of heart about consumption coupled with policies that mitigate the risk that people will be taking as they adapt to the new reality.
Finally we need our poets, artists and opinion leaders to create a positive vision of the post fossil fuel future.
11
Carbon capture and sequestration and these fancy forms of geoengineering are myths created by the fossil fuel folks to distract us from the obvious solution: stop putting carbon into the atmosphere by burning coal, oil and natural gas.
I know, the underdeveloped countries may not be able to switch to clean energy as quickly as we can. They are in the process of supplying energy to raise their standard of living up to ours. Hopefully the warm countries can soon take advantage of solar as it is becoming more competitive with fossil fuel.
But we Americans continue to put money into the pockets of coal, oil, gas and chemical companies as if it didn't matter. As with so much else, we can't get sanity through congress (let alone this bought and paid for administration.)
It doesn't help the pollution if the wealthy buy bigger yachts, but tax these guys at a fair rate and we can begin to put our country in order.
14
There are more than 450 nuclear power plants in the world. If electricity needed to run these stopped, without proper decommissioning, that's 450 Chernobyls and Fukushimas. Not just a dead planet but an unliveable radioactive planet for eons. If humans are unlikely to survive the increased heat and ensuing extinctions our current level of carbon and soon to be released Arctic methane has already locked in, the least we might do is safely close these plants so that some life forms can survive.
6
Science has long promised us that the key to salvation is to substitute the artificial for the natural. Agriculture helped us feed ourselves -- ergo steady population growth. Medicine helped keep us alive -- ergo steady population growth.
Meanwhile, the internal combustion engine helped make us more mobile -- ergo global warming. The Green Revolution helped feed a surging population -- ergo more global warming. Air conditioning helps us endure an ever warmer planet -- ergo more global warming.
So let's first of all acknowledge one thing. What science and technology have so far given us has been: global warming. And yet its advocates assure us that there is no other altar to worship at -- and that science and technology will save us in the end.
Maybe they are wrong. Maybe we should move into monasteries, take vows of poverty and celibacy, and let nature slowly heal herself. A few centuries of that might actually do something to restore a healthy balance.
3
The hubris of humankind. Here's an idea for us geniuses. Stop having more than one child. Plant trees by the thousands. Clean up the water and our soil. Ensure everyone has a living wage. Value education, learning, and creativity as joy as much as greed, scarcity mentality, separation, fear. See the life/ spirit (not religion) is in everything.
The thinking that got us into this mess isn't the same thinking that will get us out of it. Engineering our way out of a spiritual and moral problem will only get us more lost.
4
China tried this one child idea of yours. They also preferentially aborted female babies along the way as they preferred males. They quietly have reversed course. With no inbound immigration, they’re now figuring out that they face a demographic disaster of aging men leading to an ever-shrinking labor force. Unless their organic birth rates jump sharply, they’ll have a worker shortage. Hubris is telling others how many kids they should have.
@Once From Rome
I'm not TELLING anyone what to do. But it doesn't take a genius to look at world populations and see that we've over produced ourselves. Your link between making a choice not to have another child (or a child at all) and forced abortion is a false connection. No where in my suggestion did I recommend this. And, by the way, my daughter is adopted from China.
3
@Amy Haible unrealistic.
You miss the point. Knowledge and wisdom are no longer the revered goal of the populace. "Gut feeling is just as good, and it snowed two months ago so I don't think global warming exists. I've got no training, no knowledge of the subject, no wisdom and no urge to be educated about it. My GOP politicians told me it's a Chinese plot, and that's what I believe. I didn't have to think or study or reason, I only had to listen to my conservative commentators and their fossil fuel industry benefactors. They know what they are talking about. After all, they are wearing American flag lapel pins, not like those hippy climate scientists." We ARE doomed.
12
This article treats climate change as some isolated phenomenon that can be ended by cutting carbon emissions and the like. But the problem cannot be separated from the economic system that is driving the problem.
Out economic system, and its incessant demand for increased profits, is a cancer. And like any other cancer it demands unstoppable growth until the body that houses the cancer dies.
The answer to the question of whether we have the will to stop the destruction is that we will. not have the required will until we are able to face the reality of the inherent destructiveness of our capitalist economic system. Until that is faced, all the rest is mere posturing.
Replacing carbon burning with other means of driving profits through energy consumption will bring about alternative methods of damage to our planet that we have been unwilling to discuss because the discussion will reveal that incessant drives for profit are equal to incessant destruction.
12
@Che Beauchard socialism is worse.
The article is a multitude of non sequiturs.
"But as the idea’s proponents pointed out in the journal Nature, sea walls and flood defenses already cost tens of billions of dollars a year to build and maintain. “At this price, geoengineering is competitive,” they argued."
This quote appears in the same article as the en passant mention of "10 million windmills" being just one of the possible geoengineering schemes that might be required.
The author is tilting at windmills.
Many other non sequiturs, including the absurd:
"To make matters worse, the Trump administration’s recent efforts to ignore a fact-based, scientific approach — rejecting, for instance, the use of computer projections to assess how a warming world might look after 2040 — leads me to worry that climate denialism is moving from the scientific fringes to the institutional center."
There is an ancient saying in computer science: GIGO, "garbage in, garbage out".
It's hardly beyond the pale to imagine today's confirmation-bias-addled climatology field setting constants in their computer models unconsciously that adumbrate the end of the world.
The track record for such models has not been that good, yet people continue to insist they should be the basis for sound public policy.
Yes, the models will get better over time, but it will be a long and painstaking process of confirming those incremental improvements. (But the Apocalypse is now!)
Nor have we remotely figured out how to "measure everything".
9
Tampa will be among the first underwater, if hurricanes don't wipe it out first. The only Garbage In comes from conservative lying think tanks paid for by the fossil fuel industry destroying the planet. You're the frog in the cockpit in Florida. Just keep in denying, keep on lying, and keep on voting Republican. But But a snorkel in case the truth actually will out.
4
@wcdevins
Right I get it... And if I barbecue a bit less this summer, that will result in less coal emissions and in slightly weaker hurricanes.
Then, if we multiply all grill decisions to include all automobiles and home heating, then we will suddenly no longer see destructive events called hurricanes that happened throughout human history and have been less frequent in recent decades than the norm...
Right, of course. Stop burning carbon, upend the entire U.S. economy, take steps that no other country on earth will take, and the global temperature needle will move by .01 degrees in 50 years and we won't even be able to measure it -- but somewhere, a polar bear will breathe a sigh of relief.
1
I don't doubt the technology exists, but even if we had the global political will, there is no time scale in which we successfully implement these measures before we feel the devastation of climate change. Dahr Jamail's coverage of melting permafrost and methane leaks in the ocean are enough to make anyone sit up straight and realize we are past the point of hope. The best thing we can do now is enjoy the time we have left, apologize to our children, and try our best to accept our fate.
5
Geoengineering won't save you. There is no way in Gods Green Earth you can continue to extract fossil fuels at ever increasing rates from the earth and continue to live on it. Our science, that you so gloriously extoll, tells us clearly that we must make a choice.
And it's not all that tough a choice either - just switch from fossil fuels to solar power.
Why are you giving preference to these fossil fuel companies? Yes, yes, in part, our political system is bought and paid for by them. BUT, YOU'VE JUST GOT TO STOP EXTRACTING CARBON FROM THE EARTH.
And voila, here it is, a simple plan: Add a fossil fuel extraction quota, starting at 90% of what was extracted last year. Redulce it by 10% per year until zero is extracted in ten years.
9
This article says that scientists will be able to leave behind a message on stone tablets just exactly why mankind perished. Future visitors to Earth will decipher the message and wonder how we were so stupid as to destroy our own Garden of Eden.
This column outlines of the use of technology, most of it ideas and unproven technology, and with no practical idea of how much it would cost.
And cost will be the wrench in the works. The US has passed huge measures to cut taxes for the rich and fund a vast military. Funding for climate change is primarily in the planning stages and it gets only a drop in the bucket from our federal budget.
Our government spends funds for levees and dams because of the certainty of destructive floods every several years.
Yet Trump and our whole Senate refuses to fund concrete, tangible measures to do anything at all. We fund the continuation of "clean coal" and talk about the huge flocks of birds killed by windmills. We are not doing a thing.
Cost!!! We need to dedicate a huge fraction of our world financial product to fund the types of endeavors outlined here. Do we have the will to do that when the lure of the next smartphone or the next generation 16K television entices our interest?
No! We'll invest the required resources only after people start dying in droves and starving people by the millions migrate to locations with food and water. Much too late!
6
Sure. We could do all those ridiculous things. Or, we could do the one single thing that would actually work: a carbon tax.
But no, people truly hate to pay for what they get, so providing a mechanism for them to actually calculate and pay for the externalized costs of the fuels they choose to use is totally off the table.
Instead we get dumb ideas like spraying who-knows-what into the air. Sheesh.
4
It's like building a giant life-support system for the planet. But in America, we won't even pay for our people's health care. Who will pay for the earth's?
Look, I'll try to be optimistic and not poo-poo these technological solutions. But I worry the problem is much bigger than we imagine. It's not just climate change. It's the quantity of toxic and bioactive chemicals we are dumping into our environment. It's the loss of natural habitats, of soil, of clean air and water, of the flora and fauna that rely on these for life. It's the possible disruption of our food chain. And then there are the related economic and social consequences of all this environmental disruption that could drive an unsustainable human population into chaos and anarchy the globe over and at exactly the time we need order and collective focus the most.
No, I think nature will take care of this the old-fashioned way. Species that deplete the resources and destroy the environment they depend on for survival go extinct. Then the earth rebuilds. We won't be part of that rebuilding. We've outlived our welcome.
8
Read Walter Miller's "A Canticle for Liebowitz". It was written in 1959 in response to nuclear arms proliferation but it reads just as well for our current climate reality. It postulates that you are correct - Mother Earth always survives and returns. Her children don't. Life on Earth has been nearly extinguished several times in its 4-billion year history. We are heading for just one more episode, but this time it will be our fault.
7
I have a quick & dirty test I run on climate change stories; I type cntrl/f and search the piece for "population." Here it returns zero uses of that word about which all man made activity revolves, and along with reading this I can now dismiss it as a book promo of zero seriousness or value.
It's man made climate change - MAN made. The number of people on the planet is the key factor here, in particular the prospect of significant growth of that number and their movement into a middle class lifestyle over the long term. If you don't mention incentivizing population limits in a futurist climate story, you are a crank, not a thinker.
Ironically, to the PC mind population control incentives do not sit well, but to the Neoliberal machine that is supported politically by the Davos Capitalist Investor Class, rapid population growth is The Great Cash Cow. This is because more people means more consumers AND cheaper labor, a double dip for finance and Wall St. Population = assured profit growth.
It's dismaying to read these climate articles that overlook what consumer society is really all about; burning the human candle at both ends: as new consumers AND ever cheaper labor, so that brilliant capitalists and their computer algorithms can beat the human race like a rented mule.
14
We have the brains to recognize the problem and its causes, however that does not imply in any way that this means we absolutely can fix it, any more than a brilliant doctor can cure someone who has been smoking for 70 years and is now very sick.
The other part is the will. When we have a Congress which is not totally on board with climate change, led by a president who believes it is all a hoax, supported by 60 million people who encourage that president to dismiss or destroy everything Al Gore tried to present and everything Obama tried to implement, no amount of "will" possessed by the rest of us can ever make the changes which are needed. The first step is to understand and accept the science, and Americans can't even do that. When someone like Inhofe has to show Congress a snow ball to "prove" climate change is a hoax, we can see some of our elected representatives are utterly incompetent.
This is another case of science being politicized to the point of complete deadlock, and by the time that is cured it will be too late.
8
@joel strayer, many of those 60 million trump and GOP supporters are evangelical Christians. Not only does that translate mostly to less educated, it also means they look forward to the end time, the rapture. Coz they think they will meet up with Jesus. Bad news for them-- Jesus was a real human, unforgettable in his generous spirit-- but he is long gone and none of these christian nuts in control will meet up with him when we do reach the seemingly fast approaching end of the world..
Perhaps we're not as smart as we think. Sure, some of us have come up with miracles like vaccines and antibiotics, but I'm afraid the rest of us are too dumb to appreciate them. At any rate, plenty of us are rejecting the former and doing everything we can to destroy the efficacy of the latter. We also seem to have a bit of a problem with understanding longterm cause and effect. That's what's killing us with respect to global warming; the horizon is too far for our feeble minds to grasp the problem. Finally, we just can't seem to learn from history. No matter how catastrophic the events of the past, we keep going back to the same bad ideas that caused them.
5
Spend less time writing books like this and commenting on books like this, and more time arguing for policies in your city, county, and state that address climate change. That's where your voice will be heard and can make a difference.
2
If you want to experience a 1C warming change in climate, drive 40 miles south. That's the rate of change, 1C/35 miles.
Look around yourself. Are there any humans still alive? Is there endemic disease? Does any food grow at all? Did all the species go extinct?
Now drive back 40 miles north. To the safety of your home. You have experienced the future.
@novoad
Ok, this is not true. It’s about 6250 miles from the pole to the equator, divide that by 40 and you get 156, multiply that by 2 deg C and according to the above comment a difference in temp between the pole and the equator of 312 deg C. It’s more like 40
2
* not 2C just 1C so just 156 deg C, still not true
@m songster It is true, it's more like 80 miles/deg Celsius in the US.
Fargo, ND has yearly average 42F,
https://www.usclimatedata.com/climate/fargo/north-dakota/united-states/usnd0115
San Antonio, TX has yearly average 69F
https://www.usclimatedata.com/climate/san-antonio/texas/united-states/ustx1200
The difference is (69-42)*5/9 = 15C
The flight distance is 1,200 miles
This gives 1200/15 = 80 miles/C.
I stand corrected, 80miles give you 1 C in climate warming, but the point remains the same.
There are no endemic diseases in the south, or lack of crops, and the majority of internal moves within the US is southward, toward warmer temperatures.
Not northward, as predicted by climate apocalyptics.
1
The author celebrates the fact that as a species we are smart fools. We know how to develop incredible technologies, but we are lacking in collective wisdom as a species. Most notably we have no ability to keep ourselves from grossly overpopulating the planet. You don't want to be here when the big collapse occurs.
10
When most people of the world are still proud to believe in various made-up gods, and make their most important life decisions such as marriage, children, and voting choices based on emotions rather than intellect, why would you expect them to all of a sudden act expediently and rationally to save us all from extinction?
14
This piece makes the erroneous assumption that technology, in all its wonders, will ultimately save us from ourselves. It is a fools errand.
If we only look at the United States, we see a nation that is unable to keep its bridges, roads and water supplies up to date. It is a nation that struggles to deal with the health needs of it citizens. It is a nation that seems intent on ignoring climate change at the highest levels.
To imagine that these pie in the sky mitigation efforts would ever work is a fantasy of the highest order!
10
@Clyde exactly.
1
NOAA’s Unadjusted temps for the past 100 years show that it was hotter in the US in the 1930s and 1950s than it is today—though carbon dioxide levels are higher now. Not to mention how the models have failed to make accurate predictions. And as I write from Breckinridge Colorado, skiers are on the slopes this June 7th enjoying the latest ski season ever. You all would be more persuasive if you addressed these scientific and Historic facts.
@ehillesum, I am much more concerned about what is happening in the arctic and antarctic circles than I am about anecdotes from a tiny city at 11,000 feet. And so should we all be. Happy skiing and all that, but....
8
And polar I've came were much larger. Cherry picking your ignorance isn't solving the problem, it is ignoring it.
1
Brains yes; intelligence, perhaps; ethical development, highly questionable.
3
"And we chose not to act." And the DNC announces there will be no climate change debate.
6
If you want to experience a 1C change in climate, drive 40 miles south.
(That's the rate of change, about 1C/40 miles. )
The climate is now 1C warmer.
Look around yourself. Are there any humans still alive? Is there endemic disease? Does any food grow at all? Did all the species go extinct?
Now drive back 40 miles north. To the safety of your home.
1
We can't even work together on trade. We can't limit population growth. We have completely failed to implement any restrictions on our consumption of resources. We have been running around the planet, thinking that we can do whatever we want, and we will figure it out 'later.' Obviously, this attitude is fatally flawed and has led us to the place where we are at today, and still a majoirty of our leadership is pretending like nothing is wrong.
And now, all of a sudden, we are suppposed to get together and fix global warming?
There has not been any internal constraint on human greed. And, that is the reason major reason why our civilization is failing. Just before the buzzer is about to sound, you want to try for the 'ultimate long shot?'
I'm sorry, but too little, and way too late.
They knew this was going to happen ages ago, and when they could do something, they did nothing. We are still dealing with the same self-serving ignorance and greed, right now, and making very little progress.
I'm afraid to tell you, but we lost the initiative long ago.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-climate-change-almost-40-years-ago/
BTW, it's a shame what we have done to this planet, but Nature couldn't care less if Earth has life or not. The only lifeforms that care if we live or die, is us...and apparently, not enough of us. So, guess what is going to happen?
3
I think this piece does a disservice. We cannot engineer our way out of the problem with a bunch of Band-Aids.
3
We have enough brains to slowdown climate change? Perhaps.
We have enough culture to adapt to a new climate would be truer.
1
I disagree. We are the stupidest country on the planet and we are completely doomed. A few smart people are not going to fix it. We have an administration that does not believe in science, and we will most likely end up re-electing them again in 2020. We should own our apathy and our stupidity.
6
If by some miracle, tomorrow, we learned that in order to completely reverse the effects of climate change and save the planet all we had to do was get 25% of the population to clap 3 times: WE. WOULD. PERISH.
4
Liberals scream the sky is falling when they see a glacier melting on PBS television- while FOX news viewers could care less.
Acknowledge our country is completely divided on this issue.
If USA dropped fossil fuel cold turkey tomorrow.. how many years would it take for the rest of the world to catch up?
Certainly longer than it would take the USA to acknowledge we have a serious problem.
1
Liberals see truth and reality. Fox News and conservatives lie for a buck. Not an equivalence.
2
We knew all about Global Warming when James Hansen spoke to Congress in 1988. Since then, the human contribution of CO2 more than DOUBLED. So - understanding the problem is not...ummm...the problem. This is a very disappointing piece from NYT - stop trying to cater to the right-wing-light, they are still just as wrong. Give us the truth - even though few can handle it. The truth about Global Warming is that it is far too late to "fix" it, we have blown through enough tipping points and engaged enough feedbacks that it no longer matters whether we continue to burn fossil fuels or not. Abrupt Climate Change has begun, the Jet Stream has gone wonky, and things will get dramatically worse. I doubt there will be any humans left in ten years.
1
The best way to stop climate change is to stop polluting the atmosphere not pile countermeasures on top of pollution. The road to the future will mean that some businesses must go and new ones rise.
The petroleum industry has left a dirty foot print wherever it has gone and continues to do so, in both the air (carbon emissions) and the land (hydrolic fracking); threatening the long term viability of underground aquifers. No business should be allowed to put profits before the health of the environment. It is more than unwise, it is life threatening.
3
This opinion piece is simultaneously delusional and ignorant, in the sense that the former is built upon the latter. It avoids the whole issue of decarbonization by substituting a series of half baked worse case responses. To be sure geo-engineering can win us some time, but it is not the core of the problem.
The only way we have to displace carbon, starting with coal, is to follow the successful examples of Sweden, France, and Ontario, in the accelerated development of nuclear power. The Gen IV plants based upon MSR liquid fission technology, are close to commercialization in the next five years. They are designed to be standardized, modularized, and mass produced, and form the low carbon foundation for the world’s universal requirement in electrifying everything, from buildings, to transportation, and to industries which require high T processed heat. It’s the only path we have in the limited time we have, before the irreversible climate tipping points around 2050 lock us in to the runaway greenhouse.
And let’s face it, right now the nations are doing decarbonization miserably. Most nations are wallowing in delusion and ineffective policies which continue to add to emissions. Only nations like Sweden and France show that a nuclear revolution is feasible in just a few decades while cultivating relative prosperity. It can be done. It has been done. Americans need to support the existing bi-partisan political consensus on Gen IV nuclear revolution. It will soon be upon us.
2
This is Panglossian science by Gertner. I was at the Columbia Glacier when it went into catastrophic retreat the same year that the Alaska Pipeline opened. Irony. Greenland's glacial retreat is unstoppable. The Antartica's Pine Island and Thales Glaciers are next .
The Thermodynamics and Physics of atmospheric change are beyond human intervention.
Gertner neglects the micro-biologic and zoological tipping points which probably have been crossed.
The reality is that humans will have the distinction of being the first conscious self-extinguishing species. Humans have destroyed themselves thru greed,denial and magical thinking.
Do not expect that Government,the "Market" or prayer will be able to make a difference, they have made the present situation possible and will resist any serious change, until it is way too late to make a difference.
The joke will be on Bezos and Musk. They are spending their fortunes on trying to get to Mars, when all they have to do is wait a few years and Earth will be like Mars, hot and barren with an inhospitable atmosphere.
11
"We don’t need to assume an attitude of fear and dread."
I will respectfully disagree. The US has backed out of a woefully inadequate and unenforceable climate agreement, forbids environmental agencies from using the term "global warming", supports increased oil, gas and coal production--all this when we're already past 400 ppm. What number will we hit in just ten more years of inaction? Fear and dread seem like a pretty appropriate response.
Perhaps most important, the all-out Global effort we need requires the kind of cooperation among all nations which has never been demonstrated. Consider the League of Nations or the inefficacy of the UN. Throw in the poisonous nationalist sentiments currently infecting the entire globe. We'll see that kind of cooperation now because_____?
The average US citizen has a carbon footprint 2X the world average. The new middle class in China and India want what we've got. Their carbon footprints are growing rapidly. This will reverse itself because_____?
If there is reason to hope it lies in mega changes in attitudes and values. Making the earth habitable--drawing down CO2, slowing species extinction, restoring carbon and water cycles in a holistic, sustainable manner is possible. Yes. It would take an end to viewing the planet as something to be dominated, plundered, and denuded for $profit$. And an end to believing that endless Growth makes our lives better. Most people are likely to adopt these attitudes because______?
16
very well stated. Thank you.
I love the comments here. You guys are all so edifying, and I'm learning so much. However... what you experts are entirely ignorant of is how little ordinary people care about climate change. Most people won't even have the slightest conversation about it. Yes, more restaurants in Philly are offering paper straws, but when I go to a little kid's party every single one has been plastered in plastic. So okay, this fella is sugar-coating the truth, but maybe that's a pill that ordinary people might swallow. At any rate, it's the most important conversation we can be having right now. Let's keep the conversation going however we can, but thank you, naysayers, again for all the book recs. Whatever you might think of this essay, at least it led me, and hopefully many others, to this comment section... maybe a little sugar isn't so bad?
If there is anything in this world that should be apolitical, it's climate change. Wishing there are undiscovered deterrences yet to be discovered in the future is folly.
2
Nobody ever mentions overpopulation! Reducing the human population would reduce carbon emissions as well as human land use which is currently the biggest factor in the extinction crisis. China's one child policy was the most radical environmental policy ever enacted, the whole world should enact at least a two child policy until global population is significantly less than it is now. Too much of the earths surface is dedicated to human use.
5
We need people's hair on fire about the urgency of the situation. Not more pie in the sky solutions that will probably never get adopted given the reality of human nature.
5
We need government on our side. It has nothing to do with brains or ability. The Republican party espouses climate denialism, and the Democratic party hasn't advanced any meaningful legislation that might avert a climate disaster.
It's the political system that's the problem. Until countries can unite in reducing emissions, it'll be a race to the bottom.
3
Climate change is an economic problem. There’s no way out that wouldn’t destroy the livelihoods of millions of people, and bring the structure of the world economy crashing into rubble.
Maybe incremental measures like those proposed here would be effective. I certainly don’t know.
I do know that fossil fuel companies will fight them with all the power at their command, like bailers dumping buckets of water into the Titanic.
I suspect technology will in fact, after many needless deaths, finally provide the answer. Zero point energy (see Hal Puthoff) or something. But it’s going to be ugly. Very ugly, I think.
1
Mr. Gertner,
My last read before bedtime but I was impressed with your argument. I am particularly interested in your Arctic studies and look forward to reading your book.
I have a nagging worry about the potential for a runaway release of methane stored in the frozen permafrost of the Arctic. In several of my clumsy writing attempts, I have suggested that we should measure the methane release rate so that eventually we would have a better idea -when the release would be self-perpetuating as the atmosphere/oceans/Earth's surface became warmer and more and more of the frozen methane would be released, I also have the same concern that warming oceans could release the frozen methane (clathrates) in the cold ocean deposits.
My late colleague Dr. James Powell and I have surveyed the problem and also believe we can solve the problem of excessive amounts of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere.
We propose:
Beamed space solar systems will be a very major and important component of Earth’s future power systems along with ground based wind and solar, nuclear, and hydropower. With a multi-technology system, problems with one component could be handled and solved without shutting down power to Earth.
Beamed space power offers an opportunity to restore the Earth's environment to the pre-fossil fuels state.
With beamed space power, energy cost will be sufficiently low that it will be economically possible to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and sequester it.
3
As long as healthy corporate profits can be made by extracting, selling, and burning fossil fuels, “business as usual” will continue. Governments are complicit because they enjoy a lucrative revenue stream from the business, either in the form of direct ownership or taxation. This truism applies worldwide, irrespective of whether governments are democratic or autocratic.
Change may come, but it will likely take a generation or two of horrific weather-related worldwide suffering and death to get to a time when attitudes will change.
We are a shallow, selfish species - seemingly unable to think or plane much beyond our own limited lifetimes.
3
So the New York times is worried about climate change. So why does it run one negative story after another about the only company that really cares and is doing something about climate change? Of course I am speaking of Tesla.
The Tesla Model 3 is an environmentalist's dream come true. It literally runs on sunshine yet is better in almost every way than its ice competitors. As though that wasn't enough, it is engineered to last for a million miles. Contrast that to cars made by everyone else. By next year Tesla also plans to have batteries that will last for a million miles. Unlike petroleum, these batteries can be recycled forever.
Also, every car made by Tesla is designed and fully equipped to become a robo taxi once the software is ready. When that happens, most people can give up owning their own cars entirely. Imagine cities without endless parking lots.
Now go one step further and imagine putting all the cars underground. Imagine pollution free cities where the surface is reserved for pedestrians and bicyclists.
Elon Musk is making this vision of our future a reality, while the Times bashes him and his companies at every opportunity.
2
@Jemez Because a bunch of the writers are far-left radicals who don't care about climate change. What they really want is just Marxism to take hold. Climate change is just a convenient justification for why we should reorg society and capital however the leftists see fit. (I believe climate change is real but I also believe we will fix it. The radical leftist is terrified of actually fixing climate change without the Marxian reorg)
Even if aerosols worked (and there's no guarantee that we'd get it right), oceans would continue to absorb carbon dioxide and, as a consequence, would continue to acidify.
Since phytoplankton produce somewhere between 50% and 85% of the planet's oxygen, and the same phytoplankton would face increasingly acidic oceans, eventually precluding the growth and reproduction of phytoplankton, it's difficult to see how this could possibly be considered a long-term "solution".
Or, we could change our behavior, laws and assumptions.
Oh, sorry, I must have momentarily dropped into a parallel universe where Spock has a beard.
9
The ideas that would work are never considered, replaced by sci-fi fantasies that will cause even more problems than they aim to cure.
Ideas that work:
- Get rid of cars. They've been around for a little more than 100 years, they aren't a force of nature, they are a resource sink-hole. We can do without them.
- Get rid of industrial agriculture. Boo Hoo, poor Monsanto.
- At the institutional level, replace increased efficiency with stewardship.
- Pay young girls around the world not to have babies. Pay people to not own cars. Pay people not to fly airplanes. Pay people to conserve. When it becomes possible to get rich by way of doing without, there will be no more climate problem.
- Link credit creation to conservation. They are indeed linked right now as a matter of fact. This means our credit is worth less every single day.
- Hey, US! Quit with the wars already. A president that starts a 'war of choice' like the Iraq invasion should be automatically removed from office = and his political party.
- End consumption subsidies ... all of them including the credit subsidy.
The common feature to all of these and more is sacrifice. If we aren't willing to to give up our entertainments and status signifiers in this time of need then we are indeed doomed.
14
Geoengineering solutions to CO2 rise are childish. CO2 rise acidifies and warms up the seas, mostly. However, 93% of primary energy is from making CO2.
To make renewables work, one needs hydrogen for (month long) storage. One also need absolutely the three forms of nuclear energy: fission, thorium and fusion. The latter two do not cause radioactive waste or weapons problem.
I absolutely do believe in renewables (mostly solar, thermal or photovoltaics). However it can't come without ("green") hydrogen storage.
Thorium fission works, but has not been deployed industrially (its waste is limited to 3 centuries and it can't be weaponized).
An energy making fusion reactor could be deployed within 5 years, if money was no objection. Instead the work on ITER was delayed ten years, officially to mitigate spending... But truly to probably protect the financial-fossil fuel plutocracy from... fusion. (ITER, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor is refining the little details of a working thermonuclear reactor...)
It is clear, in all of this, that enormous interests are at work, which don't want the present energy making system to change. Proposing geoengineering solutions is another red herring. Besides, pollution is not limited to CO2. Microplastics are another calamity. Non biodegradable plastics should be outlawed immediately.
WHO said that millions are killed by fossil fuel every year. Fossil fuels have to be outlawed. Are we waiting for a world war?
All this optimism sounds lovely. It really does.
As far as I’m aware, the single most effective thing that we, as a species, could do to cut down on carbon emissions is to collectively stop eating meat products.
Doomed.
1
@ubique
In the short term yes, it makes sense to limit meat consumption. But what are we going to eat when the seasonal weather is too variable for reliable production of the annual cereal grains and legumes which fuel modern civilizations ? that day is coming, perhaps sooner than we think. We will be back to the period before the rise of the first Mesopotamian city states, which were only founded after the climate stabilized enough to grow the ancient grains which allowed large populations.
When (not if) that happens, we will need to become pastoralists, dependent on grazing herbivores and the hardier carbohydrate crops like potatoes. It's vitally important to support small scale, heritage breed stock holders as those are the breeds which are the thriftiest and most adaptable to the more extreme conditions awaiting us.
Recommended reading : "Cows Save the Planet"
by Judith Schwartz. Published in 2013, Ms. Schwartz clearly and accurately describes many of the climate scenarios now manifesting, less than a decade later.
Things will only accelerate from here on out.
3
There is only one political solution. We support republicans passing legislation to deregulate and subsidize nuclear power. We avoid mentioning global warming and help nuclear power to dominate the market. Democrats overwhelmingly care more about global warming while Republicans support nuclear power and deregulation in general but get squirrely when they run into global warming legislation. Passing a pure nuclear power bill would solve this problem.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/248048/years-three-mile-island-americans-split-nuclear-power.aspx
Then when power shifts to democrats they subsidize it even more while passing tacit regulations to make it appear even safer to satisfy their base. Nuclear is already the safest form of power but it is irrationally feared:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/#23f774d0709b
Assuming you can get around the pollution clause in the Antarctic treaty then an aerosol would probably be the best option. Releasing it in one place just might also spread it around the edges of glaciers due to the circumpolar current. The glacial edges are what keep the ice on the continent locked up. Those buoys, pipes, and walls would almost be instantly shredded by sea ice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance_(1912_ship)
5
Nuclear just kills us more slowly. Republicans lie. They have no energy solutions other than the laughable hypocrisy of "clean coal". Sort of the same as " safe nuclear". Yeah,the science-denying GOP will save us. Sheesh.
4
Well, all this is well and good but the fact is time is short to act and nothing is being done on the global scale that needs to happen. Until there are enough folks that take to the streets and demand that our political leaders act or get out of the way it will be business as usual and this needs to happen worldwide. The speed with which we have added CO2 to our atmosphere has created an experiment that know one knows the outcome...probably much faster and more severe climate consequences that anticipated.
7
Gertner has some interesting ideas, but we don't have the collective will to even try.
Proof of that: We live in a society where some believe vaccines are bad.
We as a country elected a con man.
People don't care enough about themselves that almost a third of Americans are not just overweight, but obese.
So we aren't going to make the drastic changes necessary to change the climate.
We aren't going to tax ourselves more, aka carbon tax.
We aren't going to make our next car purchase an electric car.
We aren't going to carpool instead of driving alone.
We aren't going to live in smaller homes that are adequate for our needs.
And most of us won't even bother to write a simple letter to our congressman/woman or senator expressing any concern about all of this.
5
The author says "The right question is: How will we use our current technologies — and our potential to develop new and better ones — to save ourselves?" The technologies to save us are already here and working. These technologies are based on renewable sources. The reasons why they are not fully applied are political to protect economic interests. The idea that some technological revolutionary innovation (nuclear fusion, the geoengineering ideas you propose here, others) will save us in the last minutes is a dangerous idea, despite your warnings, because it provides people arguments for not using the technologies that already work, and gives them blind hopes.
@J. Parula Buy an electric car and solar panels. Be the change you want to see.
I'd like to believe technology will win the day, but the stark reality is that all models for reversing warming require major carbon capture on a scale that is far beyond our current capability. That doesn't mean that we can't create it, but hope and prayer (and denial) is poor policy. As for aerosols cooling the Earth, increased CO2 is still there and will continue to acidify the oceans. If we build walls and barriers, we need to do that in a carbon neutral fashion.
We aren't suddenly going to wake up one day to climate change. It's already here. One of the first signs of a system falling out of control is increased variability. That's happening in spades.
5
@Mike S. It's okay, because we have a backup plan, it's called WW3. Nuclear Winter will negate the effects of global warming, and human over-population.
Maybe a few humans will be left to start over again, or, maybe not.
We'll see....
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/nuclear-war-global-warming_n_828496
3
@dad Yep. Nature bats last.
We could de-carbonize quickly if we chose to do so. We converted industry very rapidly for WWII and that was nearly 80 years ago when our technology was far less developed. But it will be difficult to muster such will unless the threat is sufficiently concrete. Pearl Harbor was. We will likely need something dramatic this time too.
The problem is of course that once dramatic climate consequences emerge we will be well beyond the tipping point and will be facing vast pressures not only from the climate itself but also from desperate climate migration and aggression.
So, if this is indeed the reality that is to come, we will have to be ready to act decisively. We will need a worldwide network in place to advance-plan and then manage our various responses in detail once the triggering event(s) arrives. We will need a plan specifying the technology, the detailed plans, the needed materials and sources, and the necessary intelligent and flexible logistics. And we will have to be ready as well to cope with the unfolding human consequences.
We cannot wait for governments to act. We must develop and thoroughly vet the needed plans now. This can be done with funding from various private sources and whatever public money is available. It's time to get started.
6
@David Rosen Climate change is going to cause complete chaos across the world, as people are forced to migrate, in order to survive. The poorest people in the world, will be forced to relocate to some of the richest countries in the world, causing even more chaos. The Pentagon calls climate change a 'threat multiplier.' I'd have to agree with them, on that.
We had World Wars before climate change, just imagine what they will be like, after?
http://www.igsd.org/climate-change-a-growing-threat-multiplier-says-pentagon/
1
Fermi’s paradox - how many civilizations have succeeded? That we can contemplate this question means that we can surmount the challenge and survive. I hope so because this is an extraordinarily beautiful planet that future life should be able to enjoy.
8
@Alan 99.9% of all species on Earth that have ever lived, have gone extinct. Odds are, we're toast. Enjoy it while it lasts.
https://www.aei.org/publication/99-9-of-all-species-have-already-gone-extinct/
3
My recent cli-fi novel, On Vestige Way, predicted the 2040 time for going over the climate tipping point two years ago that was just recently confirmed by the UN Governmental Panel on Climate Change report. My book also predicts mass migrations of food refugees, climate wars over water access, Antarctic destabilization, abandonment of many coastal cities world-wide, abandonment of Las Vegas due to toxic water intrusion into the aquifers supplying Las Vegas from Yucca Flat nuclear testing grounds, border walls everywhere, collapse of the capitalist economic model with the collapse of the consumer economy, a multi-meter rise in sea level and, nevertheless, the continued burning of fossil fuels despite the belated surge to alternative energy sources.
Talk of geoengineering is dismissed in my novel as it is by almost every climate scientist. This will NEVER be the hail Mary solution because attempts to shield Earth from the sun’s radiation may actually make things worse.
We pretty much are doomed without stopping the burning of fossil fuels, but with more than 100 TRILLION dollars of such wealth still in the ground, this will never happen until it’s too late.
4
One thing to consider is the delay between CO2 level build up and average temperatures. A bit like your oven, it takes a while to pre-heat until heat losses rebalance with power input. We are still moving the power dial up, the temperature has not caught up yet.
So getting started on dropping CO2 levels (after stopping the rise first) is critical. Technology solution will take a lot of time to scale to Giga ton of CO2 capture [including where to put it], so making sure policies are ahead of the technology is critical.
The lack of visibility in a future market for CO2 and CO2 derived or CO2 advantaged products is also dissuading research investment in this field. Few corporate $$$ invested on CO2 capture or reduction of CO2 impact of commodity manufacturing.
1
I still agree with Dr Suzuki - anyone who thinks climate change can be controlled using geo-engineering solutions underestimates the size of the problem. Even the advent of commercialised fusion reactors cannot be rolled out quick enough, even if there were invented today. We have 10-15 years to deal with this, so short of a simple, easily rolled out, solution, one that won’t be resisted by the powerful negatively effected by the new technology, we are in dire peril. Even simple laws like CEO’s being required by law to act in the most profitable way for shareholders, without regard to the environment, must change. I think we are frogs in the frying pan, but this is one belief where I hope i am entirely wrong.
4
@Pubert Gaylord III There is no such law that lets CEOs disregard environmental protection laws for their shareholders. At least not in America.
We are already beyond the tipping point for positive feedback effects in climate warming, so having the will to change policies will not change the outcome. Not to mention that, worldwide, there is no political will to change the policies.
But maybe we are not doomed, as the headline suggests. Our preservation might simply require that we shift our focus from taking care of ourselves toward taking care of each other.
I'm not suggesting that we have the political will for that change, at this time. I'm only suggesting that mutual aid is an option for life in difficult conditions, and that we humans are very capable of it.
Now, do we have the will to make that change?
5
The problem is the cost is local while the benefits are distributed. How do you get people to agree who should pay for these mitigation efforts? That is the problem we fact now. The reason we deny global climate change is the belief that if it does not occur, we don't have to pay to solve the problem or alter our behavior. Who will pay for that great wall or the windmills to pump the water which will cost billions?
5
We are trying to gain a consensus about slowing and reversing global warming. It will happen but if it happens only after the worst consequences are obvious, the options will be only to deal with a world that is too far affected to restore it for centuries. So the focus is not upon what will have to be done but upon convincing people that it’s worth doing.
Realistically, fixing the problem will take many decades and cost a lot of money, human effort, and great losses wealth in assets that will have to be junked.
4
The thing wrong with tech solutions is that they don't exist yet and they are being used as excuses for not doing now what we already know how to do. I keep reading reassurances that scientists will figure out a solution eventually. Not to worry.
So ironic that the people who have such a touching faith in the ability of scientists to fix the problem are often the ones criticizing the competence and motives of the scientists who are bringing it to our attention.
'Tech will fix it, is the secular equivalent of the conservative Christian argument that we need not fear, because God won't let us destroy ourselves, so we should keep on doing what we are doing, and more of it.
12
I try to be well informed but make no claims as to any expertise in the matter. Underlying much of the basic problems of civilization seems to me to be that economics and business in general is based on financial gain as a prime generator of social dynamics and actual social gain in generally beneficial outcomes to the quality of life of the population is considered a kind of magical side effect that always occurs. The driving force underlying all social activity of financial gain has reached a point wherein it is destroying the possibility of most of the life on the planet and the side effect of a better life for everybody now is working only for a very small sector of the human population and civilization has become, illogical and dysfunctional.. This dynamic has been operational for centuries and the prospects for restructuring such a fundamental operating principle this late in the game is negligible. Technological solutions to return human solutions towards a viable dynamic are highly uncertain and indicate no direct massive financial gain to energize the efforts and therefore seem highly unlikely to be undertaken with the possibility of any success. The window of opportunity for some kind of necessary change, according to the latest scientific reports seems to be possibly open for something like a decade or so at best and there are no real indications that it will be taken advantage of. I am terribly sorry.
1
This plea to reason may be heard and repeated for years without a single positive action emanating as those who have the monies to invest will demand, as they do now, controls which will only be of benefit to them.
If the road to the solution is to ever grow beyond the pathway being illustrated it will require a mindset which thusfar has remained remarkably absent.
So long as the world population continues to grow the problems we are now facing will only dramatically increase, yet while this is recognized as the major contributor to all our problems, male rulers throughout the world as well as those who politically control our culture insist on controlling men's bodies through the threat of military conflict while controlling women's bodies rather than the birth rate.
Millenia ago men who ruled then as they do now, foisted the invention of an all powerful supernatural being on their worlds guaranteeing control through fear. The entrails of the continuing mystical sacrifice they demanded then still controls most of our world's cultures now.
We are reaching a point where reason is being bombarded and denigrated here as well as the remaining so called civilized world under the rubric of "fake news"
We refuse to see the strides reason has made for the People's Republic of China and so long as we continue to avoid this reality the world we leave our children and theirs will be far more barren than the one we know.
1
The main obstacles are political both within countries and internationally. Here in the US the main political problem is we have a two-party system and the Republican Party is actually denying that global warming due to mainly human sources of greenhouse gas emissions is occurring. The main reason for the denial may be a conspiracy theory that climate change is a plot to install global world government or it may be due to the power of the fossil fuel industry. Other countries have different political problems to deal with. Internationally there is a split between the developed countries and developing countries. The developing counties have been reluctant to give up fossil fuels since they are a big reason how the developed countries were able to develop and now the developing countries want their chance. For these countries to develop based on renewable energy will take a lot of money from developing counties and this has been a source of disagreement. There is good reason for pessimism. Spraying aerosols to shade the sun would be a last ditch effort and that technique poses problems. One problem is that it doesn't reduce carbon dioxide emissions which are causing ocean acidification. Also, it is not known what type of aerosol would not effect molecules in the atmosphere so that a new problem would not be created. More research is needed. And if this technique was used it could not be discontinued because if it was the global temperature would rapidly increase.
Clearly, climate change is mostly an emotional and political problem, not a scientific or engineering onw. The mechanism underlying the problem is crystal clear even if its ultimate dimensions and precise consequences are not. We are simultaneously authors of the problem and, in our tenacious selfishness and inability to think rigorously about the long term implications of our actions, also the chief impediment to its solution. I don't see a whole lot of grounds for hope, frankly, although neither do wish to throw in the towel just yet.
4
My "future history" novel, THE PLOT TO COOL THE PLANET, explores a rogue diplomatic solar geoengineering project, and it ends on a hopeful note. But it ends in 2025. "Feel good" columns like this one lull people into thinking that of course our leaders will save humanity and civilization.
I find his optimism yet another "we could probably make it if we do all the right things right away" dream, when so far the nations of the world (with a few partial exceptions) have been unable to do ANY of the right things to mitigate climate disruption. The current increase in carbon in the atmosphere will do serious, irreparable damage for at least the next several decades, and it is too late to avoid these most of there results with any combination of the technologies he proposes, even if we could agree to start on all of them tomorrow.
I have spent a large part of my life working in state and federal government agencies, trying to make changes in environmentally destructive behaviors that damage humans and the ecological structures on which we rely. Getting changes is a much longer, slower, and more dicey effort than Gartner seems to realize.
And as the damage grows, the nations' political systems are likely to be progressively less capable of pursuing rational long-range responses. Displaced farmers and fishermen, drowning cities, widespread drought, and climate refugees will likely overwhelm governmental capacity to respond and undermine civilization as we know it.
6
All these solutions would require Republicans to actually admit something is wrong to begin with and none of them will ever do that.
9
I'm all for solutions, but this feels like the most wishful of thinking. At this point, it seems inevitable that the planet will end up on some sort of life support. The problem is that behind the Godzilla of climate change are a host of other severe problems (increasing toxicity of the oceans, loss of biodiversity, etc.). The real solution would be genuinely ecological thinking, something like Edward Wilson's Half Earth approach that would preserve half of the earth for biodiversity. But it seems we aren't really capable of this, for whatever reasons. So inevitably at some point we will begin slapping a bunch of patches on, turning the whole thing over to the engineers and the politicans. But we will wait too long. Indeed, we possibly already have. Geoengineering is destined to be the band that played on long after the ship was already doomed.
12
It's a nice thought, but we are doomed. If you think recycling your plastic water bottles or eating organic kale -or organic anything - is going to save the planet, you're mistaken. We've moved beyond the tipping point: CO2 levels have reached 415 ppm. Nothing we have done in the past 2 decades has done anything to move CO2 levels lower. Nothing.
Sadly, the poorest and move vulnerable on the planet will suffer the most. Just a few days ago the NYT published an article about corporate fears of climate change. They weren't worried about fresh air or water, they were worried about their bottom lines.
38
@J Milovich
Doomed is wrong. We are going to lose one or more large cities, and a billion people to famine, flooding, and disease. That is not "doomed." The key is if we can:
1. Maintain order by creating and maintaining relationships (uh, "America First" is not a good start).
2. Create some kind of feedback loop for fossil fuel pollution that isn't "we die if we use too much." Markets are exceptionally good at creating feedback loops for things that normally would require dying to constrain, so a carbon tax--enforced by #1 above--would pull us back over 100 years.
People aren't good at planning further than a human lifetime. But a carbon tax--essentially a tax on creating entropy--is the long-term solution to human persistence.
3
We, or at least are political class, are applying willful ignorance to climate problems in an active effort to promote conservative "thinking" that will likely make recovery impossible. They are also using propaganda to discredit anyone who does actually think about the problem as being one who will bankrupt us.
6
A key problem with using technology to address climate change is that removing green house gasses on a massive scale requires massive amounts of energy.
We don't have access to sufficient "clean energy" in the first place so such efforts can't, on balance, reduce the level of green house gasses. Ane even to attempt to do so is very costly.
The greenhouse effect is world wide and continuous. The types of steps illustrated to treverse it are mere band aids.
5
I have often wondered if all planes could be grounded for one day a week to give the Earth a day of healing and rest.
3
@Marilyn
9/11 did that for several days -- by security's necessities and not by choice. And actually increased warming by increasing sun's energy making it thru the sky free of contrails.
The author of this piece does not understand politics and how it stifles common sense at every opportunity.
Of course we are doomed... because politics dictates either inaction or action only for special interests with deep pockets and a fiscal agenda.
27
@Chuck
We are ALL a special interest. If you decided to become a parent today you re a HUGE special interest. You are interested in LOTS of things remaining intact even as you add another burden upon it.
No one is ready to sacrifice ANYTHING. And everyone STILL has the outlook that they need not.
Go watch Lifeboat, 1944.
4
We already know the answer in a certain sense.
If we expect this will to use our capacity for knowledge to derive from the state of our democracies, the answer is a resounding no. First, too many people feel fearful or insulted at the very idea of expertise, for religious or personal reasons. The fastest way to alienate the good will of too many of the people, is to be competent, never mind expert.
Second, too many see such a state of political affairs and realize they and their cronies can use such a sad system to enrich themselves, In an article last year, a developer of beachfront properties in Florida was asked if he was concerned about rising water levels due to global warming. His response was, "It doesn't affect me, I won't be around for it."
For these two reasons, the energy to mobilize the will to take bold action has very little chance of not being smothered in the cradle, if we expect our current democratic processes to organize it.
Democracy has always been dicey. And apparently, when it fails, it fails spectacularly.
6
One of the masterpieces of human busybody action almost happened in the 1970's.
1940-1970 was a cooling period, and there was a deep fear that the Earth would freeze. See here the official British data for the last century, Hadcrut (=Hadley climate center temps)
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl
Look at 1940-1970.
The big climate engineering project, aimed at stopping the freezing, was to concentrate all human resources so as to extract huge quantities of coal, basically all the coal.
And burn it to soot.
So that black soot would cover all the Arctic ice. And melt it.
Fortunately for us all (can you imagine a black soot covered planet?) Nixon founded NOAA instead, to study the problem. By the late 1970's it was clear that the cooling had ended.
All by itself.
5
Thank you. I agree we need a can-do attitude. The problem is so big that most people I know opt for fatalism. Framing is everything.
4
@Mercury S Though I appear to be in the minority, since everyone of the Readers’ Picks is gloomy. Seriously ask, what good does that do? We may not succeed in stopping catastrophic climate change, but we certainly won’t with defeatism. Let us be hopeful, and let that hope lead us to action.
7
I think it was Carl Sagan, but it could be anybody, who threw out a guess that maybe 5% of the intelligent species that evolve to about the point where we are on Earth manage to survive vs. self-destruct. Or maybe its was O.5%. Anyway, that's the message. Extremely long odds. Any chance we'll be here in 3019, just a thousand years out, not to mention 1,003,019? The key is indeed the will to do it; there will always be ways.
3
I think most of the folks responding to this article understand the real problem: there's simply no way to mitigate or manage our way out of a climate disasterof our own making. Even if human society could, on a global basis and immediately, stop using fossil fuels, stop industrial pollution and fix all the other behavioral problems by which we are destroying our environment, very little would change. The seas would still rise and engulf our coastal regions, storms would still worsen, the oceans would still become more acidic and the amount of habitable and arable land would still decrease. And, worst of all, all these events will continue to accelerate.
There's no technology that can arrest and reverse 200 years of damage in time to save us from this calamity. However, that is not to say that going "Green" is a worthless endeavor. Quite the opposite. We still need to do everything we can to prevent the looming catastrophe from getting worse. It's the difference between a catastrophe that humanity can survive and one that renders us extinct.
The key will be accepting that the world is changing beyond our control and preparing for the very predictable changes. In short, like every other species on Earth, we must adapt or die.
Yes, this is the story of evolution writ large and we are at its mercy.
49
@Paul H. Hebner
Evolution requires some kind of feedback loop. That is why markets work so well: they provide a feedback loop for behavior *before* it becomes life or death.
So, we could use a mechanism like a carbon tax to create a market (feedback loop) around fossil fuel waste, or we can not do that and wait for the feedback loop of floods, famine, and disease.
But since people hate to actually pay for what they get, I think we're gonna lose a few big cities and a billion people before we get our act together.
3
@J c, unless the economic system is what got us here in the first place.
1
@Paul H. Hebner I always wonder, if we had listened to those Native Americans, instead of killing them, maybe we could have prevented this mess.
I guess, we will never know.
2
Even though I am a senior citizen with a "limited" future, I still worry about the problem of global warming, especially since some politicians seem determined to make the problem worse.
When I see any news stories about melting ice, rising seas, dying fish, violent storms, etc., I turn the channel, because the problems seem hopeless and depressing.
Thank you, Mr. Gertner, for giving us a tiny seed of hope.
4
I'm an optimist and I have little doubt that, given sufficient time, money and scientific brain power, humans can probably apply technologies to mitigate the worst of climate change to some degree. However, with every ingenious idea comes with it the uncertainty of doing something on a planetary scale that results in no benefit or causes unexpected harm. And of course, there is Murphy's Law.
No one can seriously predict the outcome probabilities from trying radically new technologies. Meanwhile, the probabilities that we have enough time, sufficient willpower and the scientific brain power are low. And then there are those who don't much believe in science or think that science can accomplish anything like a Star Wars defense system or introducing new species into environments, expecting one result but creating another much worse outcome.
4
But before we can have any intelligent societal discussions about geo-engineering, many people would have to give up seeing "climate" as a moral issue. And that is not likely to happen, since the moral implications appeal to them in too many fundamental ways, and justify their views on heroes and villains, and also their preferred righteous political solutions.
If indeed mass application of technology got us here, then mass application of technology offers multiple potential corrections--and many do not require upturning the technology-based society we depend on. Or we could retreat to agrarian living (and shed 90% of the population).
5
No doubt we have the technology and knowledge to avoid the coming global warming catastrophe. However please name one society that has ever stepped back from environmental collapse? I hate to say it but only greed will save us. Only if renewable energies are so much cheaper than burning carbon will we turn back from the brink. This is actually true today but no one knows it because of the entrenched interests. Name one company that sells solar panels for your house? At least we have electric Teslas and scooters. Maybe only a major catastrophe will shake us out of it. My fear is we will end up like the long extinct inhabitants of Easter Island who cut down all their trees and left only stone statues.
3
Sunrun? There are lots of others in CA too.
I'm delighted to see an article that includes geoengineering. I think at this point that that is our only hope. To make a difference in the climate the way that we've been trying so far -- changing the hearts and minds of the population of the world to make them fundamentally change their lifestyles -- would be ideal but it's never going to work.
Many people say they're "concerned" about climate change, but almost no one has climate change as their primary concern. Their jobs, the chance of a better life for their children, and even abstract hatred of what the opposite side of the political spectrum wants will always overcome a concern for future generations until it's too late.
And some people will complain that geoengineering is "unnatural." Yes of course it is. We've been doing something unnatural to harm the earth for more than 100 years. It's time to use modern technology to save it.
5
@Chris NYC
I'm beginning to think geoengineering should be a fail safe, and probably should be experimented with sooner rather than later.
It might just be the most cost effective solution. Because nuclear power (through new plant designs) is probably the best energy option we have and that will cost a lot and be politically fraught. Wind and solar just don't seem to pack enough punch (see Germany).
5
@Chris NYC
Check out Inslee. He's your man.
1
@Mmm
What were you saing about Germany?
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-power-renewables/renewables-overtake-coal-as-germanys-main-energy-source-idUSKCN1OX0U2
Hello Pollyanna!
It seems you have spent so long in the hinterlands measuring ice that you have forgotten the basics of human nature. 8 million metric tons of plastic into the oceans every year. Pollution in many cities so thick you cannot see more than a block away. Rejection of almost all pollution control measures because they are either inconvenient, are short-term expensive or might reduce profit. As Stalin commented "one death is a tragedy, a millions deaths is a statistic." And no one listens to statistics. So we will run into a burning building to save a single life, but will not do a thing to prevent something that affects billions - and even less if the billions include non-humans and plants.
So, excuse my thinking that we have NEITHER the brains nor the will to do what is best for the world. But never mind, I just finished my bottled water, tossed it in the trash and now have to drive my Hummer down the street to get another one. And it is nicely cool outside, but I will have the air conditioning on because the air does not smell nice if I leave the windows open...
15
I am well aware of my panic, and really grief, when pondering the ice melting and global warming having its way with our world. It is encouraging that there are technologies available to help the world maintain glaciers and reduce carbon dioxide. One encouraging development is that some republicans now are very concerned. Everyone has been impacted by severe weather events, and I expect those will magnify, even in the next 3 years. Unfortunately, most people do not change unless they really have to and life threatening climate events really make a strong point. Once people's security is threatened, any change will be possible.
7
@K.M
Once upon a time Republicans cared.
No longer.
1
We have hypotheses about how to slow or stop climate change, but without a lot more empirical evidence, we are just giving it all our best guesses.
Our technical modern world and industrial economy demands huge amounts of energy and that it be available anytime day or night. Fossil fuels serve those requirements. At this point only some of our energy systems are supported by other kinds of fuels. Any vehicles operating on electricity still represent power fueled sixty percent by burning fossil fuels. This means that our capacity to replace fossil fuel systems is dependent upon fossil fuel systems until they are created.
As fossil fuel systems are replaced, they will become worthless, they will have no resale value at all. All of the capital that was invested in the old systems will be gone, erased. All the new systems will have to be paid with credit, and the time required to repay lenders and investors is anybody's guess.
When one looks at the projected timeline of events, we are without any margin for error but we must progress in a manner that does not exacerbate the problems. It's less a matter of will than of progressing with great uncertainty and problems at all levels to resolve.
1
@Casual Observer
Buggy whips anyone?
So said the railroads. The number one and number 2 corporations in America were The Pennsylvania and the NY Central.
Where are J&L, Bethlehem Steel, Youngstown Sheet and Tube, B&W, etc.
Nature will take its course.
@Casual Observer
An electric car, even one powered by electricity created by coal-burning, will always be more efficient than an internal combustion car.
I wish I shared your optimism, here's where we really are.
We've been burning 90+ million barrels of oil A DAY for decades. As far back as 1970, we were burning more than 50 million barrels of oil A DAY. That material is about 85% carbon, and we've been putting it in the thin, 7-10 mile layer of atmosphere that humans live in.
The carbon takes anywhere from 20-200 years to "fall" out of the atmosphere. As the polar ice sheets disappear, it reveals blue ocean. Look at what has happened to the North Pole over the last 30 years.
Imagine all that heat energy that used to be reflected by the white icy surface, being absorbed by the arctic oceans. As the ice disappears the blue water below absorbs the solar radiation. That is why the arctic is heating faster than anywhere else on the planet.
Further, as that area heats faster and farther than anywhere else, it melts the permafrost. The permafrost has trapped tens of thousands of years of decaying matter (and the associated methane). Both by freezing decomposition and by making a physical barrier from which methane cannot escape. Methane is 34x worse than carbon for heat absorption. Estimates are 7 gigatons in the atmosphere now. Permafrost houses 1000+ gigatons.
When it melts, it's lights out for humans and it's already happening.
If we do not change immediately, and move to a carbon free economy, and enact a WW2 scale program to address the problem, most living children will die of AGW related causes not old age.
18
@drew consider this new study on Methane, https://m.phys.org/news/2019-06-industrial-methane-emissions-higher.html
As if methane wasn’t problematic enough, consider new research findings on nitrous oxide, https://e360.yale.edu/digest/melting-permafrost-releasing-high-levels-of-nitrous-oxide-a-potent-greenhouse-gas
Thawing permafrost in the Arctic may be releasing 12 times as much nitrous oxide as previously thought, according to a new studypublished in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. Nitrous oxide, a powerful greenhouse gas 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide, can remain in the atmosphere for up to 114 years, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
4
@drew-----Drew, it is worth noting here that the thawing of permafrost, unlike many other aspects of this problem, absolutely cannot be reversed without a long succession of extremely cold winters.....hundreds of them in all likelihood. Tremendous amounts of energy would have to released into the atmosphere to drive the phase change from water back into ice.
4
@joel strayer
Yeah, there's nothing good about this situation. We need to immediately start an attempt at geoengineering. How do we know it works? Well, we've already done it. I doubt we can save the human race, but we should take it lying down. Making an effort would be something. We are, in some ways, a smart and industrious species. In others, we're perfectly designed to fail at this task. Long time lines, complex problems, and changes the way everything works today are not our strong points.
1
Jon Gertner, I'm glad you said "slow down climate change"—
Because it takes a lot of damage to overwhelm nature's profound homeostatic mechanisms—
Which we have done, to great and greatly looming catastrophe.
There's no linear walk-back.
4
What’s the expression, a day late and a dollar short? None of this happens without monumental and unprecedented cooperation by the major nations. They are unlikely to act until the point of no return, when drought, flood and food shortages make the truth unavoidable and remedies ineffective.
9
NYT: please provide a list of US elected officials at the forefront of climate change initiatives. Not the great middle of wafflers waiting for someone else to go first.
A list of effective leaders. I imagine AOC tops the list. We need to know who to support.
5
@kat perkins
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/policy-2020/climate-change/?utm_term=.a5651fb30484
Sen. Markey and Rep. Ocasio-Cortez spearheaded the Green New Deal legislation in Congress. Among presidential candidates,you should take a look at Washington Governor Jay Inslee, the only candidate to make climate his central issue.
The author asserts that knowledge and solutions can overcome human behavior, which neuroscience is now informing us is a function of normally irrational brains, on top of the global historical evidence of universal ignorance, stupidity, greed, fear and superstition.
Charles Koch is worth many tens of billions of dollars, and has three degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the greatest institutions of science on the planet, ever. Yet Koch is doing everything in this power to thwart sane environmental and climate policies, based on his "libertarian" psychosis that places Ayn Randian "freedom" above empirical evidence. And right now, Koch is "winning." (Mr. Gertner, and anyone remotely convinced by Gertner's argument, should immediate read "Democracy in Chains" by Duke History Professor Nancy MacLean. Charles Koch is just the leader of movement to make their "libertarian rights" supreme, even at the cost of the planet and humanity - the destruction of which Koch et al believe they can survive in comfort. Evangelicals believe they go to heaven after they die. Koch et al believe they will achieve heaven while alive, while everything and everyone else disappears. And Jon Gertner is counting on sanity?).
Mr. Gertner the problem is not the environment or the climate. The problem is people, and their brains and behavior, which have evolved for a planet we no longer inhabit. Unless you find the solutions to those problems, we really are doomed.
24
@Robert Henry Eller
"Mr. Gertner the problem is not the environment or the climate. The problem is people, and their brains and behavior, which have evolved for a planet we no longer inhabit. Unless you find the solutions to those problems, we really are doomed."
The problem is people and their base behaviors (greed, power, etc). As you mentioned, Mr. Koch is exceedingly bright, but he has his sins. As President Trump hinted during a recent interview by Piers Morgan, he isn't going to be around much longer, and that Prince Charles must be a really nice guy to actually think about folks in the future.
When climate changes truly hurts the wealthy, then we'll see some action. Until then...
6
There is zero evidence that we can control the climate. The current global warming started 250 years ago, way before big industrial emissions (and certainly a few steam engines and steam mills didn't cause it.)
At 1C/century, it's the most common kind around in the last 10,000 years.
And there were certainly higher temps, AD1 when the Romans grew grapes in Scotland and a millennium later, when Vikings had 130 self supporting cow farms in Greenland.
There are hundreds of peer reviewed paper on these topics, but people prefer to be scientifically illiterate and never read data papers. Or better still, data.
Here is for instance the official NOAA sea level at The Battery, Brooklyn. It shows that in the time of Lincoln sea levels were rising at the same rate as now. So if you reduce population and industry to Lincoln time (i.e. make the whole world like North Korea, and kill 90% of the population) seas would rise at the same rate as now.
https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?id=8518750
And no, it's not "cherrypicked." The NOAA site has ALL long term sea gauges, and none shows any acceleration. Try to find a place where sea rise accelerated.
And no, having a dozen people visit the Moon is not the same as getting wind energy when there is no wind, for everyone. That would be like moving a million people to the Moon. Which did not happen.
Here is Brest, 210 years record
https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?id=190-091
2
@novoad-Most of the places where sea level is being measured were not being measured in Lincoln's day.
Furthermore, measured then or now, sea level rise is not the same world wide. This is why it takes tens of thousands of data points to establish the trend of warming and sea levels..
NOAA has only been monitoring sea level since 1992. That is not enough time to establish long term trends which began over 100 years earlier when the industrial revolution was really starting.
2
@joel strayer "Most of the places where sea level is being measured were not being measured in Lincoln's day."
About 20 stations were being measured in Lincoln's day, for sailors. Very carefully.
The one in Brest I linked to was measured in the time of Thomas Jefferson, starting at 1810. None shows any acceleration. NOAA keeps all the historic sea gauge data, from before it was created.
Every place has a geological movement, which is linear (same rate) over centuries.
There are about 100 stations with one century of data. None shows any acceleration. There are peer reviewed papers which study the data of these long term stations.
Your statements show that you have not looked at the NOAA data, and likely never will, since you state that the NOAA data I linked to cannot exist.
That was exactly the point I was making, that climate fears are based on the voluntary or involuntary data illiteracy of most people.
"NOAA has only been monitoring sea level since 1992. "
The tide gauges at the shore are a closet with a floater, around for centuries, see
https://water.weather.gov/ahps2/images/hydrograph_photos/batn6/batn6.jpg
You are confused. In 1992 we sent in space sea level satellites.
Sea levels at the shore were measured for centuries, for sailing. They are usually called tide gauges because of that. The shore is where people live, so they allow one to see the historic trends. Seas rise at about 1ft/century.
Most of what you heard about seas is baseless scare.
1
@novoad
From a risk management standpoint, safe is better than sorry.
Here in Miami, seawalls are being constructed. We are expecting 2 additional feet by 2060.
While many other countries in the world are doing something about it, the US meanwhile does very little to help this existential crisis.
3
Talk about scientific hubris. That anyone can claim this is astonishing: "Technology can now tell us everything." I am not a climate sceptic. I believe science has shown with overwhelmingly convincing data and interpretation that the globe is warming dangerously. But technology cannot tell us everything about anything.
The various technological proposals put forth in this article all will entail massive unanticipated consequences--aerosols in the sky? What could possibly go wrong? Massive walls to block of warm water? With what consequence? Dredge cold water from the bottom of the sea to thicken ice? My word, there is no model to predict accurately and with any certainty that that will do to undersea environments or to the ocean current system.
This kind of thinking is exactly the sort of thinking that got us into this mess in the first place. What arrogance, and foolishness. If this is an example of the "brains" we supposedly have to slow climate change, then we are indeed doomed.
10
@Chris Yes, perfect words: scientific hubris, technological hubris. Hubris, the close cousin of greed.
1
It may be that all the fossil energy we expend to get us to the other side is gonna kill us after we cross the bridge (and still be dependent on a very expensive, diminishing source of fossil to sustain the green we built with fossil energy).
Ask why no other advanced species, cultured on fossil, has ever tried to contact us from the potentially millions of parallels in the universe. And why we would be exempt from their fates. Hat tip to David Wallace-Wells for that profound connection with the unknown and our great dice toss with uncertainty. Actually we are quite certain. It is the skeptics that preach: "uncertain!". And by the grace of their fossil imprinted, made-in-the-image-of-man god, we will be saved by our mirror self by faith we would never grow over the edge or that oil will never reach peak. Limits are for snowflakes.
And ask why we seem fated to this reckoning with the now-how, no-plan, plan-to-have-Putin-befriend-him-when-no-one at the correspondents dinner would, put a shank in Obama, el jefe de Maro Lago. The biggest You Been Trumped in the Universe.
The question now is just how far over we are on the edge of over? And what cathedrals of the natural world wait to be sacrificed to the burn? Carbon is but the tip of the iceberg.
3
In the late 19th Century, NYC faced disaster. It was choked with horses, and with their droppings. There was no room for more horses, and already the City couldn't live with that level of horse droppings.
Then it was solved. Technology. The internal combustion engine in cars and trucks.
Now the cars and trucks are the same sort of problem. How can it be solved? The same way as last time. Something new.
In 1880, nobody could have predicted the solution.
Today, we need to look harder and get moving.
In the meantime, geo-engineering is rather like picking up the horse droppings in NYC in 1890. It needed to be done, and short term it helped prevent disaster, but it was not the long term solution.
We're looking for alternative transport. Maybe another engine would be enough. I suspect though that alternative forms of transport will be the real answer, in some form of mass transit for large areas of the coasts.
3
The most likely (and historically supported) solution to environmental degradation and climate change is the "disappearance" of AT LEAST 7 billion humans.
And that seems to be the default solution chosen, both actively and passively, by humanity.
A population of 500 million humans might not be doomed. A planet with such a human population might be able to accommodate our ignorance, stupidity, greed, fear and superstition. As our planet has done in the past.
This assertion of course assumes that the environment and climate have not reached irreversible tipping points. An awareness of the behavior of complex systems renders such an assumption a bad bet.
27
Hear hear Eller! I’m continually baffled by our failure to recognize that we have overpopulated the earth. We are unable, technologically and willfully, to neutralize the byproducts of our existence. Negative population growth, whether precipitated by drug resistant disease, climate change, or our own sudden enlightenment is our only hope and only if we then devote ourselves fully to developing ways to survive the impending apocalypse.
15
I read this article and the responses and I marvel at how smart we are, all our technological advances and thoughts, but then wonder at the extreme stupidity and lack of wisdom we exhibit in the face of a crisis. Without the will or wisdom to act according to our highest natures that transcend greed and lowest we are no better than dinosaurs wondering about that big flash in the sky, not recognizing that it spelled the end. We are in a race for survival, but a large segment of our population will not even acknowledge it until it is truly too late. Well, maybe a few of us may mess up Mars, how absurd.
Maybe We’re Not Really Doomed After All
And maybe we should be.
1
Climate change is fundamentally an engineering problem. One that we're well able to solve. The problem is, and why the issue and its solutions rub some people the wrong way, is that its been turned into a moral crusade. And there's almost nothing people hate more than to be proselytized to about morality.
3
As others have pointed out, the problem is not technology or knowledge.
The fact remains that we know about CO2 being the main driver of the earth's warming; still humanity "decided" to do nothing about it, even when it was relatively cheap to do something about it.
The fact is the we do not have the global institutions to address any societal challenge associated with large scale geo-engineering. Indeed the US is at the vanguard to hasten the demolition of such institutions - the UN for example.
So how on earth (pun intended) do you think we can delay the cataclysm? The future cataclysm is a fact; the only open question is how severe and how/if we rebuild from it's ashes (pun intended).
2
I'm grateful for this article - but only insofar as it allows people to discuss this crisis.
That said, to suggest that we are all okay because our great technological minds will come up with a solution is at best fantasy and at worst criminal. We need people to be worried, scared, frantic and in a panic - now. We already have the deniers and grifters that continue to diminish the situation. We don't need articles that tell us not to worry because some as of yet uninvented, unknown, magic solution will save us all in the 11th hour.
Many of our "finest minds" already believe it is too late. Many of them are in grief counselling and support groups to help them deal with the depression that results from the idea of the inescapable mass extinction that is on its way.
Most of the time, optimism and positivity are the best way. But not with this, not now. We need people to be so afraid for their kids and grandkids that they stop what they are doing and march. March en masse. Block everything until remedies are put in place to immediately reduce consumption and CO2. But people will not assemble, march, revolt if they are fed some fantasy ideas about some brainiac scientist working in some lab somewhere on the crux of finding the magic pill to fix it all. There is no magic.
If there's any chance at all, it must be now and by us all.
11
@Mike Bonnell, I recently read an article linked from slahsdot that asserted humanity would be extinct by 2050 due to climate change.
That type of hysteria actually hurts the cause as it results in people discounting all warnings as hyperbole - this article and ones like it bring some pragmatism and sanity to the issue.
Climate change is real, its effects will be devastating, but overstating things does no good. We will not become extinct from this. Take a breath. Work the problem, don't dissolve into a sci-fi frenzy.
6
@mcomfort
Thanks, for what I assume are meant to be words of comfort (pun intended).
But.
In 1918 the Spanish Flu ravaged the globe. 50 million deaths worldwide - 675,000 in the US alone. Some cities suffered very high infection (as high as 50%) and mortality rates others suffered much less. Why? The cities that took the original news seriously and acted swiftly were able to better protect their citizens.
The 'problem' you suggest we work, was diagnosed some 40 years ago. We've done nothing...well, that's not true. We've polluted more, put more CO2 into the air, cut more trees - in short we've raced to make things worse.
A modicum of research will show you that many reports suggest human extinction - some in as few as 10 or so years. Others in 30. Others by the end of the century. Snoop around a bit - you'll find out for yourself.
Here's where I believe you, like the author of this article, are being foolish:
1) we don't act = imminent doom by 2100 (EVERYONE agrees on this, btw).
2) we act - but it's too little, too late = doom.
3) we act - we get lucky = mitigate loses
4) we act - it was all hyperbole = success and no losses.
Do you not see, that if we act, even if it proves to have been unnecessary, we still win. It's the only logical choice. But for this to come about, we need to act and the only way we will act is if we understand and believe that we are at the edge of the precipice. 40 years of inaction proves this last point.
4
Global warming will present many challenges, some very severe. But I do not believe it will be the catastrophe that the scaremongers claim....unless we refuse to adapt.
Much good will also come from global warming. Although some coastal land will be lost to rising oceans, new land now covered by glaciers will be uncovered. There will be more rainfall due to more moisture in the atmosphere from melted glaciers. More rainfall and warmer temperatures will mean more fresh water and more abundant crops. In many more places there will be ability to grow more than one crop per year.
There is much scaremongering that humans will not physically be able to bear an increase of several degrees of temperature. That is pure baloney. The average year-round temperature in L.A. is 20 degrees higher than Chicago. People would now be dropping like flies with corpses piling up in the streets.
Climates all over the globe have changed numerous times during the existence of human life. Humans adapted by leaving areas where the conditions changed to make life very difficult. They went where conditions were more hospitable. If humans now do the same, we will be fine. We should gradually leave low lying coastal areas and move to higher ground as the oceans rise. Gradually means not building new expensive infrastructure to replace aging infrastructure. But if we waste enormous resources trying to hold back the sea, then cost of fighting change will cause great suffering.
1
@Errol Your grasp of the realities of the consequences of climatic disruption is tenuous at best. Just how much of the earth covered by glaciers do you imagine is suitable for habitation or cultivation considering the height at which most glaciers are situated? It would have to be a huge amount considering the a third of all people (2.4 billion) live within 60 miles of the sea.
As for more crops, have you consider that plants have evolved over the last 800,000 years to absorb carbon dioxide at a certain percentage, and it will take a vast amount of time for them to evolve again. The rise in CO2
has already been shown to reduce the nutritional value of crops and foodstuffs, which means more will be needed to meet the same needs.
And it's not just humans who need to survive the rise in temperatures. What about animals and plants? If Chicago's mean temperature went up by 6º it would possibly mean the midwest would be no longer capable of growing wheat. If LA's mean temperature went up by 6º it would likely mean the city was uninhabitable.
It's not about holding back the sea; It's about reducing its temperature.
6
@Lowly Pheasant
1) "If LA's mean temperature went up by 6º it would likely mean the city was uninhabitable."
Since Phoenix has long been about 6 degrees warmer than L.A., I guess the streets of Phoenix are littered with corpses and the whole valley is empty of human life.
2) You have a strange notion that every aspect of the environment today is perfection and that any deviation brings disaster. But the truth is that the environment has always been changing and the life forms within have changed with it....until perhaps now when some humans who believe they know better than anyone are determined to force everyone else to sacrifice severely in order to vainly attempt to freeze the world just as it is.
@Errol
1)Phoenix has a population of 1.6 million. Greater LA's is 18.8 million. Do you realise the significance of the increased power demands which would be necessitated by a 6º rise? Or the changes in the impact on water supplies and on food production? Or that that mean rise of 6º might mean hottest days 20º hotter than currently occur?
2) You do get the evolution is a slow process, don't you? And that when the global temperature previously rose, it rose over millennia which allowed time for species, plant and animal, to adapt. How long to think it takes for life forms to change?
3) It's not some humans - it's the educated humans who understand things like science, diligence and intellectual honesty. Which would you rather sacrifice? Your SUV; a few flights; or your children's future and security.
Naive faith in untested technology may provide some comfort for those worried about climate change. But it's recklessly irresponsible to tell people that geo-engineering could "almost certainly" save us from the worst impacts of climate change, "if used wisely" The evidence isn't there.
In truth, geo-engineering involves largely theoretical technologies that we have no real way of testing without risking catastrophe. We simply don't know what the impacts would be of these proposed technologies: would they actually lower the Earth's temperature, and if so, would the effect be uniform? Or would it affect some areas positively and others negatively? Would there be unforeseen consequences, such as extreme weather events? We just don't know.
And consider the political problems. Suppose China wants to geo-engineer the climate in one direction that's most likely to benefit China, and the U.S. wants another that's going to benefit the U.S.? Who decides? Who pays?
We know what needs to happen: humans need to stop burning fossil fuels. We have numerous existing technologies that can replace them. The only question is whether we can summon the political will to overcome the influence of those who are making billions from the status quo.
Promising people pie in the sky, sacrifice-free, technological solutions doesn't help.
6
This seems more constructive than defeatism, certainly. If people think all is lost, they give up. This offers a different approach.
7
As a climate skeptic I have been told that the earth undergoes cycles. It may be that storms are getting stronger but the economic growth is more important than refugees from islands. The military may be more necessary with large migrations and mass droughts. The farmers are the real victims of droughts and the trade war is a self inflicted wound that never should have happened.
@Jensen Parr
"The earth undergoes cycles"... Which cycles? There are obviously plenty of cyclical phenomena that the earth undergoes with various effects and time periods over which they occur, but unless you know something that the top climate scientists who have spent decades studying this exact phenomenon, there's no excuse to simply say something so vague as an excuse to discount their millions of man-hours and petabytes of computational power spent towards modelling our current atmospheric impact or the real consequences of our actions towards the earth's overall climate.
"Economic growth is more important than refugees from islands". So you just plain haven't bothered to read about the economic impacts that climate change will have on the US? Because current projections are over 10% of our GDP will be spent preventing climate-related disasters every year by 2050. I'm not sure what study or model you are looking at to think that not acting on climate change is great for "economic growth".
6
In my opinion, it is not a matter of having the intellect or even the will. Both of those are secondary to having compassion - for other species, for people in the places who will be hurt the most, for the earth itself and ultimately for ourselves. Technology can be well and good. But in my opinion, it will not save us if we don't adjust our hearts. We're addicted to an easy lifestyle that "cheap" oil has afforded us, especially for these last 75 plus years. If we weren't addicted, we'd be able to see clearly the hidden costs of the cheap oil and of the damage we're causing ourselves.
Simplify, simplify, simplify.
22
My late environmental studies professor David Clarke put it succinctly. Organisms that exceed the carrying capacity of their environment will be involuntarily limited by factors such as disease and starvation. Humans may be different, given our intelligence and the fact that we do have all the knowledge right now to create a sustainable Eden on earth. But most likely we will limit ourselves the old fashioned way, waiting until it is too late, then reacting to mass-migration with war.
Greta Thunberg is right to demand that we panic. But those of us who have the means can also immediately go carbon neutral. Our family did it. We may or may not make it as a species, but the best way to live now is with hope for tomorrow and making positive change.
7
@pliny
What humans have shown themselves to be the most "different" at is our ability to wreck every other creatures life on a massive scale. And our 'fixes' drive up the stakes so that we are vastly overpopulated, over-cartoned, over super bugged, and way out over the cliff.
As a species, that is our exceptionalism.
10
We will adapt we always do. The problem is the space colony people. They have given up on Earth and this is morally wrong
@C. Whiting
Hi C, agreed, but not unprecedented. Example, oxygen creating algae wiped out C02 loving organisms.
1
Aerosols? Good idea. How about we use our ingenuity to outwit nature in the war on global warming by using chlorofluorocarbons as part of the aerosol arsenal in this last ditch battle for humanity’s survival? Are we smart or what?
Gosh, what a dilemma. My climate anxiety (more for my 5 year old) reached a peak a couple of weeks ago when I read the article about worms migrating north to feast on frozen Biomass in the permafrost and unleashing gobs of carbon or something to that affect. Carbon sequestration seems more plausible than walling off warm water from glaciers. At least pumping cold water up would be done with wind power. But how much carbon would be emitted building that (or any other) wall?
We should do everything possible dramatically slow Anthropogenic climate change.
However, the climate-change hystericals have no scientific knowledge of inter-glacial period. Because if they did, they'd know that we conservatively have 50,000 more years of global warming even with out the Anthropogenic kicker.
Besides the rather prosaic reasons for climate change, e.g. carbon & methane emissions, we need to address deforestation, home size, water usage & pollution, and livestock production.
I also suggest that those interested in a non-hysterical manner read the findings of the IPCC and their summaries periodically available in several magazines, including Scientific American, MIT News, Smithsonian and National Geographic.
I also recommend Wikipedia for in depth reading of Eemian Period, Holocene Period, and Inter-glacial periods. Alternatively, keep on running in circles, scream & shout.
4
@Enarco
There are over 2000 unregulated gaseous compounds regularly released into the environment, besides the carbon emissions that have caused the CO2 exponential spike.
CO2 is the easy one to mitigate. But as a Planet we haven't really started trying to clean up the mess.
The real problem will be extreme weather and the effects it has on farming. Can't farm when there is golf-ball size hail stones falling on the crops.
Simple solutions are always a win, but arrogant nonsense does nothing for anyone.
2
Sorry, but I see few 'hystericals' out there, unless you mean the Deniers.
4
There is a pretty healthy debate in academic circles about whether advocating for these technological solutions is appropriate since they address the effects (rising temperatures) but not the root causes (unsustainable GHG emissions).
I think in a sane world we would and could do both, but the global community's consistent inability to develop anything close to an adequate response to this issue shows we don't live in such a world. We need to address the root causes of climate change and our various global ecological issues (mass extinctions, ocean acidification, deforestation, etc) first and foremost. Using technological methods to counter the effects of these widespread issues will ultimately detract from this effort and encourage politicians to continue ignoring these issues because some technological silver bullet will ultimately save us from ourselves.
This is not sustainable in the long run and will result in mankind playing ecological collapse whack-a-mole, always one step behind as we continue to destroy this planet.
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We already have the technology necessary to replace fossil fuels. This technology produces by far the least waste of any method of energy production. Deaths per unit energy is also the lowest of any energy source. It's so concentrated that all the energy you need in your lifetime is contained in a ball of fuel about the size of a baseball. It's called nuclear power.
The other technologies mentioned, namely geoengineering, solar, and wind could help contribute to solving the problem. However the potential of solar and wind specifically has been vastly overrated. Basically solar and wind face two problems- you need a ton of land to get a good amount of energy, and the energy is intermittent and we don't have a good large scale storage solution. Either of these problems is bad enough that solar and wind will never be able to go a long ways toward replacing fossil fuels, which still make up 80% of our energy mix by the way.
The real cognitive block is overcoming irrational fear of nuclear. We're stuck in a political stalemate- Republicans don't want to believe in climate change but they generally support nuclear power, Democrats say they believe in climate change but oppose nuclear power. Democratic states are closing their nuclear power plants.
The real bottleneck in progress on climate is political, not technological. France built out their nuclear power plants in about 20 years and today their power is consistently low carbon. We could do the same.
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@Stephen
Stop it Stephen. They are still trying to clean up the mess left at Hanford from the first Plutonium made in the 1940s.
Factor in the decommissioning costs, and waste disposal, and you will quickly see that Nuclear energy only works in small scale situations, like powering a submarine.
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@Fred Armstrong
If you're interested in addressing the coming climate catastrophe I suggest you try to set aside the tired talking points the so-called environmentalists in the 70s used to stop the nuclear buildout in the U.S. Perhaps their most effective scare tactic was conflating nuclear power with nuclear weapons.
That's right- they made plutonium for bombs at Hanford. Not nuclear power plants. The waste is completely different.
Nuclear power doesn't need to be expensive. Take a look at this article, but the NY Time's own Brad Plummer:
https://www.vox.com/2016/2/29/11132930/nuclear-power-costs-us-france-korea
And you think nuclear is expensive, compared to what? As solar and wind make up a larger portion of the energy mix their cost rapidly increases. This is because you need more storage and because you have to overbuild the intermittent renewable capacity rather than rely on fossil fuel backup (which is what we currently do).
Plus, we have a real example of a nuclear powered state- France. Compare France to Germany. Germany has spent hundreds of billions attempting to transition to renewables. The result is electricity that's way more expensive than France. Germany emits MANY TIMES the carbon per unit energy compared to France.
Current carbon intensity:
France (nuclear) 24 gCO2/kwh
Germany (attempted renewables) 311 gCO2/kwh
Source: electricitymap.org
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@Stephen
Thanks for one of the few rational comments on the climate change issue. I am not all that concerned with climate change, per se, but I believe in efficient use of our technological resources. As such, new thorium reactors offer tremendous opportunity while vastly reducing the potential for nuclear waste.
We need to pursue "package" units. That is, mass produced nuclear power generation plants that can be placed where needed. Mass production, rather than expensive one off designs, could lower costs and make implementation quicker. This could completely change our future energy production and whatever climate change is currently envisioned.
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This may be the most extreme case of the "glass being half full" I've ever read. I don't think anybody questions that we have both the knowledge and potentially the technology to combat global warming, but of course that's not the problem.
The problem is that it's a global problem phenomenon in an era where we can't even cooperate on the most basic things. In the U.S. our political system is so thoroughly corrupt we don't even allow the scientific evidence to be discussed. We have doomed the planet for shekels. Unless the entire political system can be overhauled within the next few years it's inconceivable we can ward off the worst effects of climate change. Right now we are governed by the climate taliban. This is not simple ignorance, but a coordinated and corrupt policy to doom the earth for the short term profit of immoral capitalists.
For now our best hope is to prevent to worst of the worst climate catastrophes from occurring. Clearly for the foreseeable future we're stuck with the weather extremes we're already experiencing globally.
I think it's more constructive to accept the extreme state of our circumstances and work as hard as possible to elect representatives that will both recognize and have the courage to address the problem.
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@Richard Wilson
"work as hard as possible to elect representatives"
I see this ALL the time. As is WE are the world. I get that we might as well do everything we can (too late). But come on, There is a whole big world out there, lots of which wants to start living like us for the very first time.
We are huge and abusive to the max, but still we are a small fraction now. Population wise and carbon wise. Bad indeed, but not the whole world.
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@Matthew
Surely you have heard that China - yes, China - has deserts full of wind turbines. They have reduced their air pollution by harnessing the wind - not nuclear, wind.
China is now the leader in solar panels. We forfeited that opportunity by clinging to the campaign money from the fossil fuel industry.
We have harmed our environment, our scientific leadership, and our economy by kissing the ring of fossil fuel barons for dollars to get into office.
Terrible bargain, but a bargain indeed for the few who profit at the expense of life itself.
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Oh my. As if we need reactive techno solutions - a wall around Greenland reflecting warm water away. Aerosols in the atmosphere. No, no. the transition involves solutions known for 50 years - tidal energy (e.g. gates to the Bay of Fundy), solar energy (cells, batteries, and steam heat to run all electricity), wind and, yes, family planning. The issue is mostly political power change. How to create the political will (not needed on a level so much greater than current in California) to keep the world population from growing and the oil and gas from being used. There's the rub. Expect people to want to eat a steak, fly where they want, but now we must donate time and a lot of money to the politicians who will stop the madness.
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Very insightful article, however, I'm afraid the problem is more grounded in evolutionary biology, not psychology. Yes, we have the brains to slow climate change, just not the right wiring.
Unfortunately, evolution does not favor holistic perceptions of reality because natural selection depends on optimizing survival fitness in the present moment, shaping our sensory systems toward adaptive behavior and not truthful representation; hence our short-term needs negate the cost of long term consequences. In the simplest of bio-evolutionary terms, the sole rationale for our very existence is to stay alive long enough to pass on genetic code, thus favoring those who are best adapted to their environment in what has now become the ultimate human survival paradox: as the primal aggressive mentality that drives the socio-economic world continues to spread, effectively destroying the natural balance of the earth's ecosystem and imperiling our own survival, our unconscious biological response is to adapt to the death spiral of environmental destruction we are responsible for creating. Oops.
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@Mike 99.9% of all species that have ever existed on Earth are extinct.
"Death, is the way of life."
I guess, the sad part is that we are effectively committing collective suicide. Fortunately, whatever comes after can, if they choose, learn from our fatal mistake.
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@Mike
evolution does not favor holistic perceptions of reality because natural selection depends on optimizing survival fitness in the present moment, shaping our sensory systems toward adaptive behavior and not truthful representation; hence our short-term needs negate the cost of long term consequences.
This sounds like psychology to me. But your biological determinism does not fit with the most up to date science. It's "Nature plus nurture" in virtually every area of neuroscience and psychology.
We can either nurture a radically different state of awareness, one which perceives, viscerally, the inseparable unity at all, or we can continue to our doom.
We have a choice.
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Climate heat and drought will cause an explosive migration. The key to the future of this country is in the Democrats hands. To accept and assimilate all migrants is an old and naive plan. We must not only work against climate change, we must work within the boundaries of climate change accepting its here, and what can we do now. Israel, one of the driest countries on earth now makes more freshwater than it needs, from saltwater.
It seems as though we get more reports that strike fear than give concrete solutions. Some areas will grow more food, other areas will grow none. A pipeline from the glaciers, designing new cities to handle the coastal migration, ocean farming instead of corporate farm subsidies, the best trees that eat carbon and mostly, simplifying the message.
No need to go to Paris wasting jet fuel, this country, this America, has some of the most brilliant minds just waiting to solve the immediate problems.
"Make America Lead" again, lead the world with the key to save the world as if a shepherd into the future.
The Democrats may hold this key, if they unite and accept the challenge.
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I guess in this new, less naive plan, the refugees will die on the border, yes? While the mighty USA who are largely responsible for causing this mess look after their own.
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@s.whether
It’s now about drastically reducing population, which no country will do voluntarily. In low-birthrate countries, governments are bribing people to have more babies, e.g. the increase in the child tax credit in the recent U.S. tax legislation. Instead, all world citizens should be taxed for having children.
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If you tax everyone for having children you will cause a massive increase childhood poverty. I understand that you are concerned about the birthrate but giving the next generation a worse start in life is not a solution.
Climate change is mostly a political problem, not a technological one, but in the opposite way most people think. If a per-unit tax on fossil-fuel use were used to remove an equivalent amount of CO2 through carbon-capture-storage, that would not only completely solve the problem, it would also be politically aligned with both sides of the aisle and the energy industry could help implement it. Probably the only realistic solution.
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@sdm
Carbon-capture-storage is still in its infancy, while what will happen climate-wise in the next 20 years is already in the 'pipeline', so to speak. The oceans are at near capacity for heat storage. They have been mitigating the more extreme effects of global warming, but will soon lack that capacity. Plus, the oceans are acidifying. And there are other atmospheric gases which are much more potent than CO2 -- methane for one (which does degrade to CO2 after several decades) and Nitrous Oxide for another; the latter is also -- wait for it -- capable of destroying our now-healing ozone layer. Both of these gases are going to play a Big Role in the near future, as the Arctic continues to thaw in nonlinear but accelerating surges.
Realistically, we are going to have to adapt.
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I guess we could build a fire proof suit at great expense to survive the fire. But it seems more prudent to me to clear the brush before the fire spreads everywhere. And in this case the oil is the brush.
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