The Earth Will Be Fine, But…

Spoiled by relatively benign weather for thousands of years, we are probably not prepared for the scale of coming change

There’s something left out of pretty much every discussion, article and report regarding climate change. You’ve almost certainly been made aware of rising oceans, increasingly severe weather patterns and disruption of everything from agriculture to ecosystems to national security, as mass migrations of humans attempt to escape the results of climate change. What isn’t mentioned is that our planet will be fine. We, however, will not.

Yes, rates of extinction will rise, human suffering will as well and everything the climate change deniers insist won’t happen will. But a cursory glance at the history of earth demonstrates that while there have been five major extinctions, huge shifts in climate from hot to cold and back, and multitudes of new species rising from the environmental chaos, the planet itself will carry on as it has for many, many millions of years. It is life on the planet that, to varying degrees, will not.

This is the pragmatic reality of the future. With well over seven billion humans on the planet, many — perhaps most — will not escape the results of significant warming. Perhaps that’s not a bad thing. After all, the dinosaurs arose from a mass extinction, and then became extinct themselves when a large object struck the earth and radically altered the climate, making way for mammals — which include us…you and me. Some 55 million years ago the planet was so hot that ice and snow essentially didn’t exist on earth, and 650 million before that the planet was covered in ice that was miles deep.

You’d never know any of this by going outside in many places around our globe right now. Ironically, life actually changes the biosphere we live in. The biosphere is the very thin layer from sea bottom to upper atmosphere within which all life exists. The presence of life can and does alter climates, so in a sense we’re simply doing the same thing. But we’re going about it in ways that will make survival for humans far more tenuous, and perhaps even impossible.

Not to worry. Other lifeforms will develop over time. Evolutionary biology guarantees it. The earth will continue to exist for a very long time…perhaps up to another billion years. Then it really will be over. The sun, growing to be a red giant, will incinerate the earth — and that will be that. If you find this depressing, consider how long we live. Only those very young right now will live to experience the twenty-second century — when climate change will be far worse. Better to focus on here and now.

One wants to be careful not to become overly cynical, however. If enough of us make the effort, we still have time to slow things down. Unfortunately, that time appears to be about one more decade. The individuals who refuse to accept climate change or may even believe it’s a hoax from science or China are the only significant impediment to a truly sustained effort to mitigate (there is no reversing) what is taking place in many regions of our planet.

We have come to expect science and technology to fix things, make them better, save us from ourselves. But large complex systems, such as climatology, are not easily manipulated. Something as promising as cloud seeding to create rain, long thought to be a mitigation in terms of climate change, has proved finicky and unreliable. There are numerous caveats determining its efficacy. This is going to prove to be a common scenario.

There is also compelling evidence that without a functional way to sequester atmospheric carbon dioxide, climate change cannot be successfully mitigated. In fact, although not directly stated in most of the proposed ways of mitigating change, there’s an assumption of sequestration. The problem in this case is there are numerous issues to be resolved in the technology, it is likely to prove quite expensive and the mitigation timeline is not aligned with development.

Industrialization, technology, advances in health care and increased life spans all made our current circumstances inevitable. We didn’t know what we didn’t know. Humans can be very pragmatic either by nature or necessity, but this may not be sufficient in terms of climate change. Spoiled by relatively benign weather for thousands of years, we are probably not prepared for the scale of change that seems likely. But the earth will be fine.