Has anyone else noticed that climate change is disappearing from our collective discourse?\u00a0 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.\u00a0 In the political realm, the only climate-related “accomplishment” was the creation of some renewable energy “credits” which could be traded on financial markets.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I can’t blame them for that.\u00a0 Nor can I honestly say that I would gladly accept an Indian or Chinese level of energy consumption myself.\u00a0 As climate change fades from collective consciousness, it is becoming clear that humanity has made its decision; we have decided not to act.<\/p>\n
It is equally clear that whatever society exists 300 years from now will not be burning oil, coal, and natural gas.\u00a0 These resources are finite.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Natural gas will decline as well, perhaps beginning in 20-50 years.\u00a0 Coal, if we continue to use it at accelerating rates, could last 100-200 years.\u00a0 Even uranium, that carbon-free, risk-fraught energy source that so polarizes public opinion, will not last forever.\u00a0 Eventually we must either live with the energy the Sun sends us or else recreate the Sun here on Earth.\u00a0 The latter, otherwise known as nuclear fusion, remains a holy grail with no guarantee of success.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I’ve written at some length on how we might do that<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n Climate change, viewed from that perspective, might well be a good thing.\u00a0 We humans can act a good deal like lemmings when it comes to planning for the future.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 People call this concept the “energy trap,” and some believe we have already gone too far, waited too long to start developing alternatives.\u00a0 I am more hopeful, but given our collective inertia and inability to think long-term, I think we NEED climate change as a motivator.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n As for the actual predictions of future climate, I am not entirely convinced.\u00a0 The future, like the existence of a supernatural power, is fundamentally uncertain from a scientific perspective.\u00a0 There is, I will admit, a consensus that anthropogenic carbon emissions are warming the planet and changing the climate.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Setting aside oil industry pseudoscience, there are a fair number of scientists, particularly physicists, who remain unconvinced.\u00a0 Everyone agrees that carbon dioxide has a warming effect; the differences arise in how strong this effect is compared to other climate drivers.\u00a0 It appears that solar activity, itself not well understood, can influence the climate system in profound ways.\u00a0 So too can changes in the Earth’s magnetic field, which flips polarity at regular but unpredictable intervals.\u00a0 The last period of prolonged low solar activity (few sunspots) corresponded with the “little ice age” of the 1600s and early 1700s.\u00a0 Now, after fifty years of very high activity, the Sun appears to be going quiet again.\u00a0 A few physicists are even convinced we are headed for a new ice age, carbon dioxide notwithstanding.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 Or maybe that won’t happen and we will see the sort of scary warming the IPCC predicts.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 We have grown to fill our home.\u00a0 It’s one thing to make the wrong choice, but another entirely to never put the choice on the table.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Climate change would be a good place to start…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Has anyone else noticed that climate change is disappearing from our collective discourse?\u00a0 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 … Continue reading