The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
The challenge of human-driven climate change can be overcome, but time is running short
“Knowledge once gained casts a light beyond its own immediate boundaries.” (John Tyndall)
On the morning of Aug. 23, 1856, in Albany, N.Y., the Eighth Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (the AAAS) was called to order. It was the largest such gathering to date, but by its conclusion this particular meeting of the AAAS was notable for its lack of excitement. There wasn’t any groundbreaking, or even truly new, information.
With one exception.
In a paper of just two pages, a relatively unknown amateur scientist and inventor from Seneca Falls, Eunice Foote, presented her experimental findings on the relationship between atmospheric gases and temperature. It was the first known instance of a woman publishing on physics in a scientific journal; it was also the first practical confirmation of something earlier scientists (especially Joseph Fournier in 1824 and Claude Pouillet a dozen years after him) had guessed: the atmosphere traps heat.
But Foote was willing to go a step further. Not only was there a direct relationship between temperature and gases in the atmosphere; she believed by trapping more and more heat and changing the global temperature, human civilization could change the Earth’s climate.
It took another three years, but eventually Irish physicist John Tyndall, using more sophisticated equipment and a more robust experimental design than Foote, was able to identify essentially which gases were doing what. His findings confirmed the vital role both water vapor and carbon dioxide play in the greenhouse effect, which makes our planet habitable for life. By 1861, Tyndall had come to the same conclusion Foote had reached (although he was apparently unaware of her work): even slight changes in the concentrations of atmospheric gases “in fact may have produced all the mutations of climate which the researches of geologists reveal.”1
Thirty-five years later, in 1896, Swedish scientist Svante Arrenhuis developed an equation to calculate the relationship between atmospheric CO2 and temperature. Although his final numbers suffered somewhat from the lack of atmospheric and temperature data in his day — Arrenhuis had to make some estimates and educated guesses — his equation itself has proven to be valid. What’s more, he realized, as had Foote and Tyndall, the emissions from the burning of fossil fuels by humans would eventually cause the entire planet to warm.
But it took until the 1960s and the work of American scientist Charles David Keeling to get the data and confirm the Foote/Tyndall/Arrenhuis hypothesis. Keeling, using direct measurements of the atmosphere at Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, was able to establish the Keeling Curve — the actual concentration of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere, measured on an ongoing basis. (Ironically, the first instrument of the type Keeling used at Mauna Loa was invented by none other than John Tyndall himself, in 1864.) By putting together precise CO2 measurements with temperature measurements, scientists have now been able to demonstrate conclusively, human activity is warming the planet.
And that warming is indeed changing the climate. In fact, humanity has so large an influence we’ve arguably entered a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene.
The Good
Which is, of course, a bad thing in many ways. We’ll get to how and why in a moment. For now, we can at least be thankful to have a positive conception of what we’re doing to the climate and a clear understanding of the mechanisms at work. As much as the last of the holdout denialists may insist otherwise, there is no longer any real doubt about the science of human-driven climate change.
That at least gives us a starting point. And thanks to the work begun by Keeling, we have a very clear idea of the pace at which we’re increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. From 1957 to 2022, the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide shot up from about 315 ppm (parts per million) to almost 420 ppm, or roughly 1.62 ppm per year.
But in recent years, the annual increase has accelerated. Since China began its rapid industrialization after integration into the global system of international trade — let’s take the year 2000 for a starting point — atmospheric CO2 has gone from 360 ppm to the current level. Which means well more than half of the recorded rise has happened in just the last two decades.
In fact, the average annual increase has gone up each decade since measurements began on Mauna Loa. It’s more than fair to say, we’re bending the curve in the wrong direction.
So, it's not good. But to again look on the bright side, we at least have a pretty thorough understanding of our current situation. There isn’t a great deal of mystery. And thanks to the work of paleoclimatologists, we also have a pretty good idea of what Planet Earth was like the last time there was this much carbon dioxide in the air:2
The atmospheric burden of CO2 is now comparable to where it was during the Pliocene Climatic Optimum, between 4.1 and 4.5 million years ago, when CO2 was close to, or above 400 ppm. During that time, sea level was about 78 feet higher than today, the average temperature was 7 degrees Fahrenheit higher than in pre-industrial times, and studies indicate large forests occupied areas of the Arctic that are now tundra.
Fortunately, there’s a lot more to the climate than just CO2. We can think of carbon dioxide as kind of a global thermostat: dial up the concentration and temperature increases, turn it down and it decreases. But it’s not the only factor. We haven’t quite baked in (if you’ll pardon the expression) such dramatic changes quite yet.
And it’s important to keep time scales in mind, too. A human lifetime is barely a blink of an eye in geological terms. It takes a long, long time for the planet to shift from one climactic state to another absent some massive external forcing, like the meteor strike which wiped out the dinosaurs. Given enough time, the more catastrophic scenarios (at least in terms of human existence) are indeed highly plausible, if not verging on a certainty. But they’re not going to happen right away.
We also now know the climate models scientists have been working with are proven to be “skillful” — in scientific terms, they’ve accurately predicted what has eventually occurred. Which means we can be confident the projections (not predictions) of what we can expect in the future are likewise reliable, especially since both the models and the computing power they rely on have only gotten better. We have a fairly good idea of what’s coming.
But it’s not perfect. Our understanding is only general. Even the best-designed models using the most powerful computers can’t perfectly simulate the climate. There are just too many variables. Even as our understanding grows and the full dimensions of the challenges we face become clearer, there is always the chance for a surprise, and almost certainly a highly unpleasant one at that. As the concentrations of greenhouse gases increase, so do the risks of hitting some unknown climactic threshold, a kind of tripwire which triggers some runaway effect we don’t expect and can’t get ahead of.
As it stands, we’re already seeing some troubling signs. The increases in extreme weather and the changing weather patterns are obvious enough. So is all the melting ice. But if we really want to know where we are headed, we have to look to the oceans.
The Bad
While carbon dioxide is the climate’s thermostat, the oceans are the regulator of the entire environment. Without the oceans, there would be no biosphere, no living things on Earth. Indeed, life itself almost certainly began at the bottom of the seas. And to this day, just as throughout the story of life on Earth, the constant exchange of water between the atmosphere and the oceans is what makes life possible.
But the water cycle isn’t the only connection between sea and air. The oceans also trap a tremendous amount of heat — in fact, about 90 percent of the global warming of the last few decades has been absorbed by the oceans. The warmest ocean temperatures ever recorded were just a couple months ago, in December 2022. And thanks to both thermal expansion (warmer water takes up more space) and the continued melting of ice on land, last year also saw the highest recorded sea level, yet another indication of how much extra thermal energy has been sequestered by the seas.
Where things start to get really dicey is in the question of capacity. Is there some kind of upper limit, some point where the oceans can’t absorb any more heat? Or even start to release it? Scientists aren’t sure. They do know sequestered heat can be released to the atmosphere through several natural processes, including well-known natural phenomena like the periodic El Niño.
They also know there’s tremendous potential storage capacity in the ocean depths; whether the circulatory processes will send excess heat deeper or let it go into the air is dependent on a lot of factors. A lot depends on which part of the oceans we’re talking about, too. Different areas are warming at different rates. (Unfortunately for us in the United States, one of the fastest-warming bodies of water is the Gulf of Mexico.)
Heat is also not the only thing water absorbs. The world’s oceans are also a great “carbon sink” — a place where carbon released into the atmosphere gets sucked out of the air. About 30 percent of humanity’s carbon emissions get dissolved into the oceans rather than form carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Had all the extra carbon we’ve been pumping out since the start of the Industrial Revolution been turned into atmospheric CO2 rather than carbonic acid in the seas, we’d be in pretty big trouble already.
Which is not to say we’re not in pretty big trouble already. For one thing, even without the effects on temperature, the acidifying of the oceans poses a danger to the global food chain. Billions of people rely primarily on the seas for sustenance. And given the central role of the oceans in our overall environment, changes there can affect our ability to produce food on land as well, and in dramatic ways.
For another, the natural processes which have to account for our burning of fossil fuels usually play out over thousands, tens of thousands, even millions of years. By massively accelerating the release of carbon and zooming past the parameters of the carbon cycle, we’re literally running headlong into unknown territory. We can point to certain times in Earth’s geological history and say ‘x’ CO2 concentration correlates with ‘y’ temperature, but we can’t say exactly what will happen along the way as an epoch’s worth of carbon gets released in just a couple centuries. We just know where we’ll end up. Eventually.
Unfortunately, the real problems will arrive long, long before we get there.
The Ugly
Up to now, we’ve been mostly talking about the science of human-driven climate change. And in a lot of ways, we’ve just scratched the surface. The climate is an immensely complex, closed system; the science involved includes virtually every field, not just chemistry and physics and geology (although those are the foundations). New discoveries and insights occur almost every day.
But in another way, it’s simple enough to understand: add more heat — which is thermal energy — and you turn up the dial on everything. All the variations within the climate get more extreme, sometimes in counterintuitive ways, as when the weaker jet stream causes a polar vortex and massive cold snaps across the United States. It’s an event driven by a warming Arctic and a lower temperature differential between the northern latitudes and the continental United States, which slows the jet stream and causes frigid arctic air to spill out of its containment, so to speak.
At the time, many climate denialists pointed to the extreme cold in the winter of 2014 as evidence against global warming. When the same thing happened in February 2015, then-Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) famously brought a snowball to the floor of Congress as proof the planet isn’t really warming.
But the effect was in fact caused by a warming climate. What had been a relatively rare event happened repeatedly over a period about a decade, from roughly the mid-2000s to the mid-2010s, before abating somewhat as temperatures climbed even higher, especially up north. And now, after seeing it often enough, the public is generally aware of what a polar vortex is and what it’s going to mean for their weather for a few days. They’ve adapted.
Unfortunately, it’s not possible to adapt to everything associated with human-driven global warming and the changes it’s causing to our climate. Dialing up the energy trapped by our atmosphere means dialing up both weather and climactic extremes. And extremes are not something which are suddenly going to start happening once the global temperature hits a certain point; they’re happening now. We’re already struggling to come to grips with the slow-rolling challenge we’ve created for ourselves even as it intensifies.
One area of particularly acute concern is climate-driven mass migration. For many Americans, it’s something to be concerned about in the future, and in places which don’t directly affect their lives. Leaving aside for the moment the interconnections of our modern globalized world — everything affects everyone, everywhere — most of us are probably missing the mass migration already beginning within our own borders. As journalist Jake Bittle points out in his new book, The Great Displacement, in some places an increasingly inhospitable climate is already putting some Americans on the move. Today. And more are sure to follow.
We are in no way, shape or form capable of handling, at least at the present time, the political ramifications of social and economic displacement. For proof, one need to look no further than the crisis on our southern border. While much of the relentless wave of Central American migrants have been driven to seek refuge in the United States to escape intolerable social conditions, especially the tyranny of drug gangs (who are financed mostly by the purchase of illicit street drugs by Americans, by the way), at least as many, if not more, have been forced from their land by deteriorating climactic conditions, including an extended drought.
In a perfect world, Congress — where immigration policy is determined — would recognize the root causes of the crisis and take appropriate action to deal with it. Which is something we’re more than capable of doing. After all, we’re not Syria, where a similar climate-driven mass migration may have been the spark to ignite a civil war. Our institutions, properly maintained and administered, have proven over time they can handle whatever the world throws at us.
The catch is the properly maintained and administered part, of course. Ultimately, our institutions are only as good as the people in them. If their primary incentive is the seizure of political power, it may be more advantageous for them to not solve a crisis so it can be used as a political cudgel to bash the opposition, over and over.
That kind of thinking may be the greatest single impediment to getting out of the predicament we’ve gotten ourselves into. Not far behind may be the insistence on using the crisis to reorder the world’s socio-economic foundations. If right-wing nihilism and left-wing dogma are the two prongs of the horseshoe, where they meet might be a kind of political Sargasso Sea, where nothing moves.
And we do need to move. As time goes on, we’ll be addressing the specific issues on an ongoing basis here in the pages of Commentatio. One of the recurring themes we’ll touch on is the opportunity within the crisis — the buried truffle of a potential New Age, built on a New Industrial Revolution. It doesn’t require a great deal of vision to see, and in fact we’ve already taken some significant steps in the right direction. The question is really more one of whether we will do it, rather than whether we can.
It’s a question we can’t answer yet. Maybe we won’t be able to until it’s too late. It’s always possible we’ve let too many things slide for too long when it comes to the maintenance of a democratic society; if politics has become a cultural rather than an ideological battleground, the wars over identity alone may be enough to stifle the kind of pragmatic progress we need to make. It’s certainly a distraction we can ill afford. The job ahead requires a level of cooperation far beyond anything hyper partisan politics can produce.
It also requires a firm understanding of what the job actually entails. And that may be the ugliest truth of all. We already seem to be perilously close to some tipping points which we haven’t fully understood up to now. There is extreme danger lurking in the way feedback loops operate in the climate. The more we use up the available carbon budget (the amount of carbon we can continue to release into the atmosphere before hitting certain temperature thresholds), the tighter the margins become.
As it is, we have to acknowledge some very uncomfortable facts:
It’s already too late to stay below 1.5 degrees Celsius in additional warming, and in all likelihood, we’re going to blow past the 2 degrees Celsius threshold as well.
Thanks in large part to our emphasis on electric vehicles, demand for electricity will be 14-19 percent higher by 2030, and 27-39 percent higher by 2035 — but we don’t have the energy grid in place to support it.
Even in the most optimistic scenarios, wind and solar won’t be adequate to supply the base load we require even at today’s levels; we’re not making it without nuclear power.
We’ve already locked in enough warming to create the need for mitigation measures like building massive seawalls which, along with the construction of nuclear plants, will require the extensive use of concrete — another significant emissions contributor which will further eat into the carbon budget.
Proposals for miracle solutions like geoengineering and solar engineering are not only unrealistic, but far more likely to kill us all than anything.
There’s plenty of other bad news, including the simple fact global carbon emissions are actually on the rise. Not only are we not even close to where we need to be; we’re not even going in the right direction.
The Sunny Side of the Street
But let’s not end on a sour note. There’s enough climate catastrophism out there, and it’s not really helping. If anything, by focusing on the worst-case scenarios (and let’s face it, they are really bad) rather than realistically addressing what we can possibly do about it all, we’re more likely to paralyze action than generate it. What’s more, most people rightly think about big issues in personal terms — how whatever question is on the table affects their daily lives. “Save the planet” doesn’t really resonate.
Neither does the gradual nature of the climate crisis. For most people, hearing about a bump of a few millimeters in sea level or a fraction of a degree in global temperature doesn’t set off alarm bells. What does concern them is a bump in their energy bills.
And that may ultimately be the way out. By pursuing a pragmatic course, one which focuses on the practical benefits of shifting away from fossil fuels and into renewable energy, we can develop our way out of our current predicament. As I’ve often said, the way out of any hole you’ve dug yourself is up.
The abundance agenda points to one way we can go, and it’s a good one, at least in general terms. Personally, I frame the question as one of broad-based prosperity rather than focusing on the supply side, but the advocates of the abundance agenda are at least in the right ballpark. (The opposite view, which advocates for degrowth, seems even worse than going in the wrong direction; it’s going backwards.) We’ll be talking more about it going forward.
We’ll be talking about a lot of the more specific innovations we can make use of too, like creative construction techniques and some of the potential breakthroughs in energy production. We’ll look at how they work. Some avenues — biodiesel and hydrogen power for cars, trucks and buses, for instance — may not have been adequately explored up to now. We’ll take a look at why.
Ultimately, I firmly believe we can find our way through. And if we do it right, we’ll come out ahead, eventually. The one thing we cannot afford is to do nothing.
Kevin J. Rogers is a freelance journalist and the executive director of the Modern Whig Institute.
John Tyndall and his pioneering contributions to climate science and scientific outreach - NASA/ADS (harvard.edu) [https://bit.ly/3RQROSl]
Carbon dioxide peaks near 420 parts per million at Mauna Loa observatory - Welcome to NOAA Research [https://bit.ly/3lrnVM6]
Bravo! In electrical engineering we learn, and often observe, that an uncontrolled closed loop system results in excessive swings, both positive and negative, or as in this planet, hotter and colder. Great stuff Kevin.