Has anyone else noticed that climate change is disappearing from our collective discourse? It has been pushed aside to make room for ballooning debt, fiscal cliffs, endless discussion of unemployment and economic recovery, marriage equality, and any number of presently-hotter topics. In the political realm, the only climate-related “accomplishment” was the creation of some renewable energy “credits” which could be traded on financial markets. Fossil fuel consumption continues to increase globally, with no end in sight as the huge “emerging economies” of China and India set their sights on more cars, more electricity, more resemblance to a US or European lifestyle. I can’t blame them for that. Nor can I honestly say that I would gladly accept an Indian or Chinese level of energy consumption myself. As climate change fades from collective consciousness, it is becoming clear that humanity has made its decision; we have decided not to act.
It is equally clear that whatever society exists 300 years from now will not be burning oil, coal, and natural gas. These resources are finite. All the easy oil is gone; despite drilling ever deeper and farther offshore, fracking the “tight” deposits, and steaming oil out of shale and sandstone, global oil production is not increasing and will soon begin to decline. Natural gas will decline as well, perhaps beginning in 20-50 years. Coal, if we continue to use it at accelerating rates, could last 100-200 years. Even uranium, that carbon-free, risk-fraught energy source that so polarizes public opinion, will not last forever. Eventually we must either live with the energy the Sun sends us or else recreate the Sun here on Earth. The latter, otherwise known as nuclear fusion, remains a holy grail with no guarantee of success. Fortunately the Sun sends us plenty of energy, roughly 7500 times more than we use in all of our cars, trucks, trains, planes, homes, factories, and computers. We can, if given enough time, capture enough of that energy to provide 9 billion people with a European standard of living (the average American uses twice as much power as the average European for no good reason whatsoever) without significantly detracting from energy fluxes to the biosphere, hydrologic cycle, and weather patterns. I’ve written at some length on how we might do that, but suffice to say it will require a great deal of time, money, commitment, and willingness to prioritize long-term goals over short-term profits.
Climate change, viewed from that perspective, might well be a good thing. We humans can act a good deal like lemmings when it comes to planning for the future. Clearly we realize that our grandchildren will not be burning oil, if only because what little oil remains will be so difficult to extract that it will be more like copper is today – used as little as possible and only where absolutely required. Equally clearly, if we want our grandchildren to be able to fly, drive, or take the train, we need to develop ways to do those things without oil, BEFORE we run out of oil. That’s because building roads, runways, cars, and planes with today’s technology uses lots of oil, and we won’t be able to build out the replacement transportation infrastructure (most likely a blend of biofuels, solar hydrogen, and electric) if oil is prohibitively expensive. People call this concept the “energy trap,” and some believe we have already gone too far, waited too long to start developing alternatives. I am more hopeful, but given our collective inertia and inability to think long-term, I think we NEED climate change as a motivator. If we get enough heat waves, floods, droughts, superstorms, and sea level rise, perhaps we will finally connect this to fossil fuels and levy a much-needed carbon tax – a tax that will both give untaxed renewables an economic advantage (spurring increased adoption through market forces) and generate revenue for both disaster response and renewable energy research.
As for the actual predictions of future climate, I am not entirely convinced. The future, like the existence of a supernatural power, is fundamentally uncertain from a scientific perspective. There is, I will admit, a consensus that anthropogenic carbon emissions are warming the planet and changing the climate. That consensus is, at this point, made stronger than it actually is by a groupthink phenomenon: once the majority of scientists support a hypothesis it becomes difficult to acquire funding to pursue alternative hypotheses. Setting aside oil industry pseudoscience, there are a fair number of scientists, particularly physicists, who remain unconvinced. Everyone agrees that carbon dioxide has a warming effect; the differences arise in how strong this effect is compared to other climate drivers. It appears that solar activity, itself not well understood, can influence the climate system in profound ways. So too can changes in the Earth’s magnetic field, which flips polarity at regular but unpredictable intervals. The last period of prolonged low solar activity (few sunspots) corresponded with the “little ice age” of the 1600s and early 1700s. Now, after fifty years of very high activity, the Sun appears to be going quiet again. A few physicists are even convinced we are headed for a new ice age, carbon dioxide notwithstanding.
I would not be entirely surprised to see solar activity and Earth magnetism change in a sort of homeostasis to balance out the effect of carbon dioxide. Or maybe that won’t happen and we will see the sort of scary warming the IPCC predicts. Regardless, we need to move beyond using finite, polluting, ecologically damaging fossil fuels as soon as possible, and if climate change can help spur that action then by all means I hope it returns to public consciousness.
Let gays get married, let folks smoke weed if they want to, stop paying hospitals twice as much as Europe for the same level of care, extend health coverage to all, raise taxes on the wealthy (and a little bit on everyone) to balance the dang budget, do all of the above without paying lawyers $50 billion to write a thousand volumes of legalese, and for Pete’s sake let’s get some real discourse about issues that affect the future of humanity. Things like climate change, population growth (and incentives to control it worldwide), biodiversity loss, dwindling fossil fuel reserves, alternative energy development, wasteful consumption, loss of meaningful human communities, epidemic levels of anxiety and depression, obesity, corporate control of agriculture (and everything else), and access to nutritious food and clean water. Collectively, our social behavior has improved in the last centuries, but there are now, for the first time ever, enough of us that our mistakes and decisions really matter. We have grown to fill our home. It’s one thing to make the wrong choice, but another entirely to never put the choice on the table. So, I say, it’s time to resolve our petty disputes and start the work of consciously engaging with the issues that directly affect our well-being, our descendants, and our planet. Climate change would be a good place to start…