Why a Climate Emergency?
Emergency from a medical perspective
We live in a world where habitual exaggeration dilutes the meaning of many important words, including emergency. Today’s example was a headline, “Seattle’s homelessness emergency.” A need for speed, surely, but not an emergency, even by analogy. Is ‘climate emergency’ another exaggeration that needs to be discounted? No.
Surely, for some commentators, habitual exaggeration is in play for climate as well. But what makes our climate problems qualify as an emergency is this: they now need the habits of thinking that emergency-management pros have developed.
We need to quickly shift gears in the way we think about the climate problem. It has gone from fifty years of climate creep to a decade of climate leap. There was a surge (triple or worse) in five types of extreme weather. All have been sustained; all began between 2000–2012. We are now in Phase Two of Climate Disease.
In an emergency, quick action is absolutely essential because of catastrophic consequences otherwise. You drop whatever else you were doing. For example, if someone’s heart stops pumping oxygenated blood because the pacemaker rhythm became disorganized, quick means just a few minutes to avoid brain damage or death; chances of recovery drop about ten percent for every minute of delay.
How long does it take medics to arrive with a defibrillator? In thinly populated areas, often longer than ten minutes. In the city, it depends on the traffic, the elevators, and whether there are bystanders who can locate an automated defibrillator (labeled AED) and apply it.
There are ‘windows of opportunity’ that one must not miss, and many require thinking ahead in the same way that the driver of the medic van chooses a nonstandard route to better avoid a few minutes of gridlock. Dispatchers may simultaneously send two vans, approaching from opposite directions.
Think ahead. Here are two examples, representing those practitioners of emergency management with the best training.
[Richard A. Clarke, the White House crisis manager on September 11, 2001, speaking after the first of the four attacks] “It’s an al Qaeda attack and they like simultaneous attacks. This may not be over.”
“Okay, Dick,” Condi said [Condoleezza Rice, the President’s National Security Advisor], “you’re the crisis manager, what do you recommend?”
She and I had discussed what we would do if and when another terrorist attack hit. In June I had given her a checklist of things to do after an attack…. My mind was already racing, developing a new list of what had to be done and done now.
…I resumed the video conference. “FAA, FAA, go. Status report. How many aircraft do you still carry as hijacked?” [FAA Administrator Jane] Garvey read from a list: “All aircraft have been ordered to land at the nearest field. Here’s what we have as potential hijacks: Delta 1989 over West Virginia, United 93 over Pennsylvania…”
Stafford slipped me a note. “Radar shows aircraft headed this way.”
…[President George W. Bush, upon returning to the nearly-deserted White House] “I want you all to understand that we are at war and we will stay at war until this is done. Nothing else matters. Everything is available for the pursuit of this war. Any barriers in your way, they’re gone. Any money you need, you have it. This is our only agenda.”
The President asked me to focus on identifying what the next attack might be and preventing it.
— Richard A. Clarke’s Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror.
Physicians are the more frequent practitioners of emergency management; we medical school professors work hard to train all of the med students to think ahead, to leave no base uncovered.
My example comes from the medical specialty called emergency medicine where they deal with emergencies every day.
· Those docs have an aphorism: “Think fast. And then think again.” Re-assess the initial diagnosis (think “global warming”), in case a new player has arrived on the scene in the manner of internal bleeding (think “extreme weather”).
· Keep in mind just how long it takes to acquire and analyze the data, the way the docs order lab tests now that might make a difference an hour from now when results come back.
· The docs routinely start intravenous fluids as a precaution, just in case shock starts to develop later — even directing medics in the field to start an i.v. before transporting the patient, as finding a vein can be extra difficult when bouncing around en route (think “extreme weather” again).
For our climate emergency, we are doing no such things. There is no subculture with a set of best practices regarding interventions. None. It is time to start borrowing and innovating.
How to think about it. In the 36 years that I have been closely following developments in climate science, I have also picked up on how climate scientists approach those aspects outside their comfort zone, such as any form of climate action other than emissions reduction.
They are not trained for doing interventions (of course, for climate problems, neither is anyone else). Indeed, they were told by the IPCC thirty years ago that solutions were the government’s responsibility to propose, that they should stick to reporting the climate facts to officials. Of course, we all know how that has turned out.
And so, when discussing our climate problem with climate scientists, I have sometimes found myself saying, “That’s the wrong way to think about it” because I could guess what the emergency medicine experts would say. Most of the big IPCC physical-science reports similarly lack the right mindset for effective intervention. While they get the diagnosis aspects right for climate creep, they just don’t approach the prognosis and treatment aspects in an effective way. There is little notion of a window of opportunity, of thinking ahead so that action doesn’t start too late.
What to do? Most of those “climate solutions” in the headlines turn out to be slight tweaks in the preferred direction, often overclaiming just to gain attention. For the others, there are three categories.
·For emissions reduction, neither tweaks nor doubling down will, given the new pace of extreme weather, accomplish very much. Too little, too late.
· Reflecting some sunlight back out into space would be useful — but filled with side effects if done globally. An exception may be an “Arctic Halo” covering one percent, just to reset the jet stream loopiness by restoring the Arctic sea ice.
· Taking the excess CO2 out of circulation would also address ocean acidification at the same time as cooling us off.
So far, our climate efforts seem patchwork, lacking coherence. One hears “Every little bit counts” as if something were sure to make a coherent whole out of the various efforts. None of it captures the urgency with which we must act, that there are slippery slopes out there, danger zones where chances of recovery become smaller and smaller.
How to start, what with climate denial gridlock in high places? As a workaround to that, the CO2 Foundation has proposed a Governors’ Design Initiative to Repair Climate run as a nonprofit, where a group of experts work together for a few years to design and prototype a big project that takes the 45 percent excess of CO2 out of circulation. They would finish with prototypes and field trials in only four years, as did the Manhattan Project between 1941 and 1945.
For speed, it would utilize a finance committee of a dozen tech billionaires, who already appreciate what speed of development often requires. The governors would oversee the project, representing the public interest. They would likely hire an experienced serial entrepreneur to act as general manager. Other big countries need to start something similar, then begin cooperating. Government involvement would need to kick in by the end of the four-year design project for the mass implementation. The Design Initiative should serve as a prod.
A lot could happen in the meantime, but our situation is not hopeless, as attention-grabber headlines are starting to suggest. Our situation may be bad, but it is not too late. There are effective actions we can still take to repel the extreme weather invasion, if we get our act together in a hurry.
William H. Calvin, Ph.D.
President, CO2 Foundation
Professor Emeritus, University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle
The Series:
1. Extreme Weather Has Created a Climate Emergency: Our CO2 cleanup must be big and quick.
2. Avoiding “Too Little, Too Late“ — An appraisal of climate actions.
3. Why a Climate Emergency? Emergency from a medical perspective.
These brief articles are adapted from my forthcoming book, Fixing the New Extreme Weather. My earlier books on the subject include Global Fever (University of Chicago Press, 2008); more illustrations and sources are at CO2Foundation.org. I wrote the first major magazine article on climate instability, “The Great Climate Flip-flop” which was The Atlantic’s cover story for January 1998.
