My Terrifying Talk with a Climate Change Expert
We’re on the brink of an absolute nightmare — here’s what has to happen now
We’re chroniclers, now, of climate change. We’re observing the drying up of rivers and lakes around the world, droughts in East Africa and parts of the US, floods in Pakistan, a hurricane devastating southwest Florida, and the melting of sea ice at the poles. Maybe we’re writing about it to each other in emails, in our journals, or here on Medium. We’re watching as it all unfolds.
I wrestle with this surreal feeling. Like it’s a movie or some dystopian sci-fi novel. To be completely honest with you, there have been moments I’ve thought, “let it run its course.” But that’s likely because of the difficulty humans have emotionally connecting to really big problems. And climate change is the biggest problem the world has ever experienced. Letting it “run its course” would mean unimaginable suffering worse than any war or plague or dark age the world has yet known.
It’s understood among those in the ending-world-hunger programs that you won’t get donations and sponsorship by giving people statistics. People don’t respond to “a million starving children need your help,” they respond to “little Sally is starving.” That’s primarily because we’re hardwired for the story. When it’s about a specific person in need, our mirror neurons get fired, and we care. It’s hard to care for numbers. But even if we force ourselves to think — these numbers are people — we still might resist on the basis of futility. What’re my ten dollars a month going to accomplish?
We have a hard time seeing how things work in aggregate. We’re better off focusing on things right in front of us. Our own lives, our families, and our community. But we’re now past the time when that kind of approach would make the change we need to avoid the absolute catastrophe climate change will cause and in a very short time.
I’ve recently spoken to someone who has been working on this for fifteen years. Someone who works on climate policy and clean energy finance ideas for a think-tank wing of the World Bank. His take on the situation is dire. We’re out of time. The Greenland and West Antarctic Ice Sheets are in a condition in which they could be approaching, at, or perhaps even past, something called an “ice mass dynamics phase-transition boundary.” Beyond this phase-shift boundary, they’ll continue to melt down regardless of what we do, in a self-reinforcing process.
Knowing precisely when this will occur is tricky, and has to do with the structural integrity of outlet glaciers, subsea ice grounding lines, and the balance of ice melt versus snowfall year to year. But what’s clear is that we will eventually experience enough sea level rise to lose our coastal cities. In order to slow this process, we need to cool those polar regions. One possibility, this person tells me, is to deploy drone-like ships which use sea spray for marine cloud brightening. This increases albedo, or reflection of the sun’s warming rays, back into space.
It sounds like pure science fiction, but it’s not. The use of aerosols to help cool things down is part of the rapid intervention climate strategies currently on the table.
It’s a stopgap measure, not a solution in and of itself, but it’s a completely necessary one. We will lose dozens of major coastal cities around the world: London, Venice, Sydney, Lagos, Hong Kong — and all the civilizational infrastructure they hold — if we do nothing. This is not an option.
Parallel to this stopgap is other “must-haves” that also must be deployed immediately. We’re at 420 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere and climbing — we need to get that number down to 300 or below. How? That’s up for discussion. But we need a competitive market for this kind of CO2 re-sequestration, or “CDR” (carbon dioxide removal), and a final payor. Ideally, we get carbon dioxide in the atmosphere down to 275 ppm over the next 100 years, according to my source. It’s no small task since that CO2 removal is going to be larger in total mass transfer than all of the oil and gas industry output since the beginning.
We also need affordable low-carbon energy, now. We need to be adding clean power capacity at the same time we’re shutting down dirty power capacity. One idea, if we can make it work: deep-well geothermal supercritical steam generation. We can be converting coal plants to this geothermal, so we’re not building all anew. We need governments and venture capitalists to get this going in the next two years. Call it the “clean steam initiative,” converting dirty coal to clean steam via deep-well geothermal.
At the same time, we need to be building gigafactory complexes around the world. 100 in ten years, minimum. These factories produce solar panels, batteries, and wind turbines in various host countries through power purchase agreements — guaranteed prices per kilowatt hour to help with the large upfront costs. We need a system for rolling out these gigafactory complexes. An Elon Musk type who gets his head out of his ass and starts doing what’s important to save millions of lives and our home planet.
And we need weather- and climate-independent food systems.
The whole thing is like a recovery clinic, my source says. A patient sick with drug addiction is on the verge of death. We need to stabilize the patient and work with them on their recovery starting immediately. The albedo increase to cool things down and the switch to clean energy can and should happen together. Not in sequence, but parallel.
We’ve been asking ourselves the wrong questions, and we’ve been setting goals that are too abstract. Keep average global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. Okay — how? The solution is in the details. So we need numbers and goals that make sense.
How do we stabilize the sea level?
How do we best do carbon dioxide removal?
Who will pay for the conversion to clean steam power plants?
What are our systems for rolling out the gigafactory complexes?
To recap: we’re on the verge of losing major cities around the world from sudden and dramatic sea level rise. We’re destroying the biosphere from too much carbon in the atmosphere and dirty power. The major climate tipping points in the offing will hasten the worst calamities yet — devastating heat waves, floods, droughts, and storms.
We must have:
- Immediate roll out of albedo increasing geoengineering
- Removal of CO2 from the atmosphere
- Shutting down of coal
- 100–200 gigafactory complexes for green hydrogen and solar, etc
- Weather and climate-independent food systems
Any dalliance at this point will equate to millions of deaths, and trillions in damages around the world. There is no time to waste.
Talking to this person left me wondering: given these monumental must-haves, is there anything a regular person can do at this point? What can I do, what can YOU do?
There’s a lot of talk these days about “doom” versus optimism. The internet loves a good binary — that way everybody can square off and spend time arguing their side while someone, somewhere, makes money off the ads. My source and I agreed we’re each both “doomers” and optimists. The situation is utterly grim, apocalyptically dire, but we can and must nevertheless do everything we can to mitigate and ameliorate and bring things — eventually — back on track. It’s possible. We have to try, anyway.
At the same time, while there are these big ideas for must-haves, it’s still important and good that you’ve gotten that e-bike, or that you’re limiting your meat and dairy. It’s meaningful that perhaps you’ve chosen a hybrid for your next vehicle, and that you’re eschewing plane travel (at least until there’s a flight near you powered by biofuels).
But it’s just not the case that your contributions — any of our contributions, in the aggregate — are going to create the change we need. The damage, as it were, is largely done. We’re seeing the effects now of human activity from prior decades, not today; today’s damages will show up shortly down the road. So it’s something else we can do — prepare for the major challenges that are on the way. These changes will affect everyone — some certainly more than others — but climate calamity will leave no family untouched.
Talk to your spouse, your friends, and your kids. Make it a part of your life, not something you avoid. Don’t tell yourself stories about how changing your bulb to compact fluorescent or growing a few tomatoes are the best anyone can do. We can all do more, including taking a hard, honest look at this, and getting prepared. Mentally, physically, and emotionally.
I was recently listening to Neil Degrasse Tyson on Sam Harris’s podcast, and he reminded the listeners what exponential growth means. He used the example of an algae that doubles in size every day. It starts out microscopic, and you drop it in a pond. A month later, half the pond is covered with algae. How long until the whole pond is covered?
The answer is not another month. It’s a day.
That’s exponential growth.
We are, right now, in that half-covered pond.
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Edit 12/3/22 I mis-characterized runaway melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets from passing the phase-shift boundary as “any day now,” and used “seven meters” to describe imminent sea level rise. While ice melt is occurring at accelerating and unprecedented rates, “any day now” is more hyperbole than best description of the glacial geology and climate science, so I’ve rewritten that section.
