Climate optimism4/28/2023 (Naomi Klein’s 2014 book, This Changes Everything, by way of example, argues for both.) Even when prompted to offer a path forward, fatalists tend to offer unrealistically revolutionary solutions, such as a complete reversal of the Industrial Revolution, or the destruction of capitalism. Moreover, such hyperbolic language (“genocide,” etc.) can easily present a strawman target for climate skeptics. The central message that many ordinary people have heard since SR15 is that disaster is imminent, and there’s no realistic options for preventing it. ![]() In other words, there are perfectly good reasons to be pessimistic.īut climate fatalism takes pessimism too far. What’s worse is that these threatened changes are happening so quickly that they would override the internal thermodynamic feedback mechanisms that usually dampen oscillations within our climate system. A transformation back toward this kind of planet would be bad enough in its own right, as billions of humans would see their habitats inundated with sea water or otherwise rendered inhabitable. To find carbon dioxide concentrations comparable to those we observe today, we’d have to go back much further-three million years, in fact.Įvidence suggests that during these warming periods in our climate’s history, sea levels were over six meters higher than those observed now, the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets were substantially smaller, and temperate forests covered areas currently occupied by permafrost-laden tundra. To find a comparably abrupt climate shift, we’d have to venture back 130,000 years, to a time just before the Earth plunged into its most recent Ice Age. Global mean temperature already has risen approximately 1☌ since 1850. Carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere rose steeply thanks to the burning of fossil fuels, and global surface temperatures followed in lockstep. This era of stability ended roughly 150 years ago, at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. You can’t move a whole coastal city (let alone a country) as the waters start to rise. ![]() The downside is that the societies we have built are predicated on the stability of that same climate system. Little ice ages and medieval climate anomalies notwithstanding, the Holocene epoch-spanning the last 10,000 years, give or take-has featured a prolonged and relatively stable warm period that proved a suitable backdrop for the development of agriculture, cities and all the flurry of human activity that these permit. Civilization, as we know it, got its foothold during a particularly placid time in our planet’s climate history. We should remember that it isn’t so much the survival of our species that is at stake, so much as the survival of our society. ![]() A good example is Wallace-Wells’ 2017 dystopian New York magazine feature “The Uninhabitable Earth,” whose headline warns readers of “famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us.” Many readers can be forgiven for responding to such stories not by reducing their carbon footprint, but by driving their SUV to the mall to stock up on canned goods, iodine pills and ammunition. Michael Mann, Penn State climatologist and producer of the famous “Hockey Stick” graph, for instance, is openly skeptical of our ability to avoid the 1.5☌ warming threshold stipulated in the original 2015 Paris Agreement-but also sensibly suggests that we can still agitate for productive action by “focusing on achievable targets.” Full-on apocalypticists, on the other hand, constantly emphasize the worst possible scenarios (sometimes oversimplifying the science in the process). Such fatalism should be distinguished from mere pessimism. We have reached the point where pessimism is blurring into outright fatalism, a trend that may well stifle needed momentum toward climate action. As a graduate student in climate science, I regard such apocalyptic predictions as deeply counterproductive. But the reaction to the UN’s recently released Special Report on the subject, known as SR15, highlights the fact that global-warming believers themselves are deeply split on how to act in the face of what is arguably humanity’s most pressing challenge, dividing themselves between optimists, pessimists and, as described below, full-blown fatalists.Ĭommenting on the SR15 authors’ conclusion that humankind has just two decades to avoid a global cataclysm, Emily Atkin of The New Republic argued that there is now “no logical reason to be optimistic about the planet’s survival.” In a column for New York magazine, David Wallace-Wells proclaimed a new era of “climate genocide.” Guardian columnist David Sirota declared that we are facing “the end of the world” in 2040. For decades, the response to the threat of global warming has been divided roughly into two categories: those who believe anthropogenic global warming is a serious problem, and those climate “skeptics” who don’t.
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