The Earth has had 5 mass extinctions (before the one we’re currently in). All but one of the extinctions were because of greenhouse gas and climate change (only one was asteroid for the dinosaurs)

The most Nestorius was 250 million years ago that warmed the planet by 5 degrees, which then triggered the release of methane, another greenhouse gas, and ended all but a slither of life on Earth

We’re currently adding carbon into the atmosphere at a considerably faster rate. There is more carbon in the atmosphere than any point in the last 15 million years. There were no humans then and the oceans were more than a hundred feet higher.

The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, as pernicious as the one that says it isn’t happening at all. It comes to us with several other comforting delusions:

•  That global warming is an Arctic saga, unfolding remotely
•  That is just a matter of sea level rise and coastlines It is a crisis of the natural world – not the human one

The difficult thing to fathom is how much worse it might get due to the known feedback loops we’re currently fueling.

Arctic ice and Heat

Some climate cascades will unfold at the global level. A warming planet leads to melting Arctic ice, which means less sunlight reflected back. And more energy absorbed by a planet warming faster still. Which means the oceans are less able to absorb atmospheric carbon.

A warming planet will also melt Arcti permafrost, which contains 1.8 trillion tonnes of carbon , more than twice as much as is currently in the Earth’s atmosphere And when released may evaporate as methane, 34 times as powerful a greenhouse gas as CO2

Forest Fires

Higher temperatures mean more forest fires and fewer trees, meaning less carbon absorption, means more carbon in the atmosphere and so on.

Water Vapour

A warmer planet means more water vapor in the atmosphere and whatever vapor being a greenhouse gas, brings higher temperatures still.

Oceans Absorb Less Heat

Warmer oceans can absorb less heat, which means more heat stays in the air and contains less oxygen (the doom for phytoplankton).

 

There are the ones we know of, and then there are of course the ‘unknown unknowns’.

There remains so much we do not know about the way global warming effects the way we live today. Will warming trigger rapid feedback loops because of the Arctic methane, or by the dramatic slowdown of the circulation of the ocean?  It is impossible to say for sure.

Our Actions so Far

In 1997 was the signing of the Kyoto Protocol – two degrees was considered the threshold of catastrophe – where what we call natural disasters normalizes to bad weather. There is almost no chance we will avoid that scenario

The Kyoto protocol achieved nothing In the 20 years since despite all the progression on green energy, we are producing more emissions than 20 years ago.

In 2016 the Paris accords established 2 degrees as a global goal With no developed country on track to meet its agreements, 2 degrees looks like a best case scenario

Climate Injustice

In 50 years the world’s population doubled, but the fraction in poverty has fallen by a factor of 6. About 50% of humanity to about 10% In the developing countries undernourishment has dropped by 30%. The graph that shows recent progress in the developing world – on poverty, hunger, education and infant mortality and life expectancy, and gender relations are practically speaking the same graphs that trace the dramatic rise in global carbon emissions that has brought the planet to the brink of overall catastrophe

This is one aspect of “climate justice”

Not only that the cruellest impacts of climate change will hit those least resilient, but to a large degree what could be called humanitarian growth of the developing world’s middle class has been paid for by fossil fuel driven industrialisation.

An investment in the well-being of the global south made by mortgaging the ecological future of the planet. This is one reason that our global fate will be overwhelmingly shaped by China and India who have the burden of trying to bring many hundreds of millions more into the global middle class while knowing that the easy paths taken by the nations that industrialised in the 19th and 20th centuries are now paths to climate chaos

 

What We’re In Store For

 

Heat death

 

Surviving means having to continually cool off, as panting dogs do For that the temp need to be low enough for the air to act as a kind of refrigerant, drawing heat off the skin so the engine can keep pumping.

At 7 degrees that would become impossible for the planets equatorial band, and the tropics After a few hours the human body would be cooked to death from the inside out

At 5 degrees Parts of the globe will be unsurvivable for humans

At 4 degrees (the IPCC prediction) Would deliver wildfires burning 16 times as much in the American West

Since 1980 the planet has experienced fiftyfold increase in dangerous heat waves. The 5 warmest summers since 1500 have all occurred since 2002. Predictions say that the BAU scenario, the number of days warmer than the warmest days of 2017 will grow by a factor of 100 by 2080

Cities (where everyone is moving to) will magnify the problem of high temperatures. Asphalt and concrete and everything else that makes a city dense, absorbs ambient heat, storing it for a time in slow release . The concrete and asphalt absorbs so much heat during the day when it is released at night, it can raise the temp by 22 degrees Fahrenheit

 

Hunger

 

Climates differ and plants vary, but the rule of thumb for staple cereal crops grown at the optimal temperature, for every degree of warming yields drop by 10 percent. If we warm by 5 degrees we’ll lose 50 % . Globally grain accounts for about 40% of human diet, whey you add soybeans and corn you get 2/3 of human calories.

UN predicts we’ll need twice as much food by 2050. Beyond carbon, climate change means staple crops do battle with more insects Increased activity can decrease yeilds another 2 – 4 %, not to mention flooding.

 

Drowning

 

In 2018 a study showed that the rate of melting has tripled in the last decade. From 1992 to 1997 it lost 49 billion tons. From 2012 to 2017 it lost 219 billion tons.

To what degree we will adapt to new coast lines is a matter of just how fast the water rises. When Paris agreement was drafted their expectation was the water would rise by at most 3 feet by end of century. National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration suggests 8 feet.

Since the 1950’s the continent has lost 13,000 square miles of ice. The last time the Earth was 4 degrees warmer, there we no ice at either pole and sea level was 260 feet higher

Jakarta is one of the world’s fastest growing cities – today home to 10 million Thanks to flooding by 2050 it could be entirely underwater.

If nothing is taken to curb emissions, global damages could be $100 trillion per year by 2100 – that is more than global GDP today.

Most estimates are at about $14 trillion, 1/5 of present day GDP.

 

Wildfire

 

When trees die – by natural processes, by fire, at the hands of humans – they release into the atmosphere the carbon stored within them – sometimes for as long as centuries  .

In this way they are like coal, which is why this might be the most feared feedback loops. The worlds forests that have been carbon sinks would become carbon sources

At present the trees of the Amazon take in a quarter of all the carbon absorbed by the planets forests each year. In 2018 Jair Bolsonaro was elected president of Brazil promising to open up the rainforest for development – deforestation. How much damage can one man do to the planet? Between 2021 and 2030, Bolsonaro’s deforestation would release 13 gigatons of carbon.

Dying oceans

At 70% of the earth’s surface it is by an enormous margin, the planet’s predominant environment. Along with everything else it does, oceans feed us

Globally it accounts for 1/5 of all animal protein in our diet The oceans maintain our planetary seasons through prehistoric currents like the gulf stream, and modulate the temperature of the planet absorbing much of the heat of the sun

Presently more than 1/4 of the carbon emitted by humans is sucked up by the oceans. In the last 50 years, the oceans have absorbed 90% of global warmings heat Half of that has been absorbed since 1997

In which warmer oceans strip reefs of the protzoa called zooxanthellae that provide through photosynthesis, up to 90% of the energy needs of the coral   .

Each reef is an ecosystem as complex as a modern city. The zooxanthellae are its food supply, the basic building block of an energy chain

When they die the whole complex is starved

Since 2016, as much as half of the Great Barrier Reef has been stripped in this way .The large scale die outs are called mass bleaching events By 2030 warming will threaten 90% of all reefs

 

Economic collapse

 

The murmuring mantra of global markets, promise something like their eternal reign That economic growth will save us from anything and everything

A lot of the economic growth previously seen is simply the discovery of fossil fuels and all their raw power. A one time injection of value into the system that had been characterized by unending substance living Before fossil fuels nobody lived better than their parents of grandparents or ancestors from 500 years before

You don’t have to believe that economic growth is fueled by fossil fuels to worry that climate change is a threat to it. Estimates suggest for every degree Celsius of warming, reduces growth by 1%

There are places that benefit by warmer temperatures – Russia, Scandinavia, Greenland

But in the mid latitudes, the countries that produce the bulk of economic activity like China and the USA, lose nearly half their potential output

The warming near the equator is the worst, with losses in Africa, Mexico and Brazil reaching nearly 100% What climate change has in store – is not a great Recession or Depression – but in economic terms – a great dying

The market logic was probably always shortsighted, but over the last several years, the equation has flipped We now know that it will be much, much more expensive not to act on climate change than even to take the most aggressive action today

BIAS FOR INACTION

With the likely costs of inaction clearly building up, why are not acting swiftly? Behavioural economic literature might have some of the answers. Below are some of the selected human biases from Daniel Kahneman in Thinking Fast and Slow, and Nassim Taleb in ‘The Black Swan’

What you see is all there is

WYSIATI refers to the fact that we normally make our judgements and impressions according to the information we have available. In general we don’t spend too much time thinking “well, there are still many things I don’t know”. Simply, we assert what we do know.

We look outside and the sun is shining… we don’t see the ice caps melting so don’t consider it

Survivorship bias

Lots of civilisations have gone down in the past… we’re only hearing the cultural narrative of the only one that has survived (us).

We can’t hear from the civilisations that have failed.

Associative Coherence

There is a high negative correlation between level of benefit and risk they attributed to technologies (they should be somewhat mutually exclusive… Like nuclear power has high benefit high risk…)

When people are favorably disposed towards a technology, they rated it as offering large benefits and imposing little risk. When they disliked a technology, they could think only of its advantages, and few advantages came to mind

We have an inability to distinguish benefit and risk.

“The emotional tail wags the rational dog” – Jonathan Haidt

Fossil fuels are beneficial, which they are… means we can’t accurately predict their risks

People who think free markets are beneficial (which they are) can’t acknowledge their risks

Intuitions vs formulas

Experienced radiologists who evaluate Xrays as normal or abnormal contradict themselves 20% of the time.

We know from studies about priming that are unnoticed has a substantial influence on our thoughts (they could have heard about someone dying of breast cancer on a podcast the day before)

Lots of humans are relying on intuition rather than formulas

We should rely on the formulas, not the inexperienced Anchorman’s point of view

Sunk cost fallacy

The emotions that people attach to the state of their mental accounts are not acknowledged in standard economic theory –

If you buy a movie ticket and it sucks, the fact that you pay for it shouldn’t matter  –

You should just walk out – this is the sunk cost fallacy

Our whole culture has invested a lot of money into infrastructure for fossil fuels. It is hard to make the equation of future costs of using fossil fuels, we irrationally lean towards not wasting everything that’s been spent

People have spent their whole lives working and gaining skills in dirty industries… biased to remain where they are and don’t throw that out

Confirmation bias

Confirmation bias is the human tendency to see all evidence as supporting your beliefs, even if the evidence is nothing more than coincidence.

We believe it only happens to other people  – tendency to interpret any new information as being supportive of the ones we already hold

Doesn’t matter how poorly it fits our existing worlds. We will twist it.

Your brain will take in information and will take the path of least resistance, and instantly interpret the observations to fit your existing world view.

Smart people aren’t better at arriving the correct answer, they are typically just better at finding ways to support their pre-existing beliefs – motivated reasoning. Those who don’t believe in climate change can be very smart at finding reasons to support their worldview. They aren’t evil people, just looking to confirm the conclusions they’ve already arrived at.

Anthropic Principle

Cosmologists talk about the improbability of anything as advanced as human intelligence any where in the universe as inhospitable to life as this one. Every uninhabitable planet out there is just a reminder of how unique our set of circumstances is to produce a climate equilibrium to support life

No intelligent life that we know evolved anywhere in the universe outside the Goldilocks range of temperatures that enclosed human evolution, that we have now left behind.

Perversely decades of denial and disinformation have made global warming not merely an ecological crisis but an incredibly high stakes wager on the validity of science.

In the test of climate change we have a sample size of just one. Nowhere else in the known universe is a single planet as suited as this one to produce life of the kind we know

Global warming makes the proposition seem even more precarious. For the entire historical window in which human life evolved, almost all of the planet has been quite comfortable for us, that is how we managed to get here