We can’t save the world but we can try to measure how bad our choices are

Dealah_da_Twitta'
Plan@
Published in
10 min readSep 29, 2020

1,5 years ago, on a rainy October weekend in Austria, we won 10.000 EUR from Startup Live to work more on the questions that are burning in us. (We haven’t received the money, but that’s another story). We pitched an idea of a chatbot on messenger/Alexa/Google home that helps people gain information about living a more sustainable lifestyle by making more conscious choices on their decisions. We planned to launch a monthly campaign to propel lifestyle change and raise awareness.

The fail of a sustainability startup

The implementation of the chatbot went fairly well and we managed to test-launch a chatbot that was able to give some information about the project. The chatbot was able to speak about the monthly challenges we planned to launch and we also test rode Watson’s and Google’s approach of an intelligent conversation machine that allows people to learn more about facts about climate change, helped them understand their individual impact, and provided guidelines to a more sustainable lifestyle in terms of the planetary resources.

Nevertheless, the content was incomplete, the test showed that people are not massively engaged by the details, and we could not blame them. The deeper we dive into the science of climate change we become more convinced that is already far too late and without radical governmental actions with policies the individual impact of individuals is good for almost nothing.

We investigated what would happen when they are. What if we reach 50M people living in well developed western countries and all of a sudden stop them buying beef and drinking milk; all of them start carrying bags for shopping; they stop buying waste, shop only local food, insulate their house, and close the tap during showering, after riding their bikes? From a climate perspective, most probably nothing. Meanwhile, we reached our super ambitious and truly improbable corporate goal and everyone did what we’ve just asked.

The climate impact of putting the whole world in quarantine only pushed Earth Overshoot Day from July 29 in 2019 to August 22 in 2020. We can hardly solve the problem, but we need to understand the systemic reasons behind our consumer decisions.

We had to realize, we need more radical actions worldwide, other than monthly social campaigns that raised everness in public.

We learned that people feel rightfully dissatisfied with the expected impact of their individual actions meanwhile, governmental and corporate bodies hesitate to take action either by the assumed short-term benefits of climate change or by the immediate loss in competitive advantage well described by the tragedy of the commons.

Despite the fact, we realized sustainability become the buzzword of the good old times when we thought climate change has not happened yet and won’t take its toll in the near future, we kept thinking on the topic and we concluded that sustainability can not be clearly measured by KPIs simply linked to greenhouse gas emission¹, as they often counter-interact with the most elemental needs of human beings and actually misses

the ultimate goal of saving the human civilization.

Frankly saying, at the beginning we thought that saving human civilization might be a bit of an overstatement, but the more we read, the more it becomes obvious. We realized that actually, it might be just the case. When you are wondering about the possible scenario of the survival of 500M-1 Billion humans close to the poles, does that define the case?

When we did the math we had to accept the unavoidable, and instead of thinking how to stop climate change deeply rooted in individual actions of the mass, we started to focus on estimating its impact. We understood that in the current situation it makes more sense working on the resilience of individuals as an attempt of saving human civilization, rather than working on trying to change their habits when circumstances do not support their aim.

Trying to estimate the impact

Similar to us, academic, governmental, and independent thinkers are all making efforts estimating the impact of climate change and its social impact when billions moving from regions that already started to become inhabitable.

Climate model predictions published in the recent decade systematically underestimated the effect of change. The last few years of data showed² (see the Figure below) that less optimistic and more drastic scenarios have to be taken into consideration. Human-induced warming reached approximately 1°C (likely between 0.8°C and 1.2°C) above pre-industrial levels in 2017, increasing at 0.2°C (likely between 0.1°C and 0.3°C) per decade (high confidence)³.

The “hothouse Earth” planetary threshold could exist at a temperature rise as low as 2°C, possibly even lower.⁴ When the “hothouse Earth” scenario has been realized, and Earth is headed for another degree or more of warming, especially since human greenhouse emissions are still significant⁵.

Possible impacts of the 1.5–2°C human-induced temperature rise that is most probably already locked into the climate in the form of CO2 and unavoidable feedback loops. A number of ecosystems will collapse or reformed substantially, including coral reef systems, the Amazon rainforest and the Arctic. The sixth mass extension of earth history is already in action induced by us.

Poorer nations and regions, which lack the capacity to provide artificially-cooled environments for their populations, become unviable. Deadly heat conditions persist for more than 100 days per year in West Africa, tropical South America, the Middle East and South-East Asia, contributing to more than a billion people being displaced from the tropical zone. Water availability decreases sharply in the most affected regions at lower latitudes (dry tropics and subtropics), affecting about two billion people worldwide. Agriculture becomes nonviable in the dry subtropics. Most regions in the world see a significant drop in food production and increasing numbers of extreme weather events, including heatwaves, floods and storms. Food production is inadequate to feed the global population and food prices skyrocket, as a consequence of a one-fifth decline in crop yields, a decline in the nutrition content of food crops, a catastrophic decline in insect populations, desertification, monsoon failure, and chronic water shortages, and conditions too hot for human habitation in significant food-growing regions. Even for 2°C of warming, more than a billion people may need to be relocated.⁶

In a study, written in 2007, when a temperature rise of 2°C was considered unlikely, models showed that this could be enough to cause the collapse of the current world and end of the civilization as a possible outcome: “Massive nonlinear events in the global environment give rise to massive nonlinear societal events. In this scenario, nations around the world will be overwhelmed by the scale of change and pernicious challenges, such as pandemic disease. The internal cohesion of nations will be under great stress, including in the United States, both as a result of a dramatic rise in migration and changes in agricultural patterns and water availability. The flooding of coastal communities around the world, especially in the Netherlands, the United States, South Asia, and China has the potential to challenge regional and even national identities. Armed conflict between nations over resources, such as the Nile and its tributaries, is likely and nuclear war is possible. The social consequences range from increased religious fervor to outright chaos. In this scenario, climate change provokes a permanent shift in the relationship of humankind to nature”⁷.

“In high-end scenarios, the scale of destruction is beyond our capacity to model, with a high likelihood of human civilisation coming to an end”

After years of effort and considerable resources devoted to airplane safety, we have reached a point where 27 planes crash on average every year. If dying in a flight accident was as likely as a 3°C global temperature increase, then the number of people dying in airplanes every year would be 15,000,000.⁸

We realized that the risk of catastrophic climate change is unbelievable high, increased by insufficient knowledge and understanding of impacts and vulnerability and it will lead to a massive decrease of the human population, even the loss of it.

Loss of a civilization?

The collapse of our civilization is out of reach our routine imagination despite the fact it would not be the first in human history.

A bronze age civilization 5000 years ago, the Indus Valley Civilization developed sophisticated infrastructure and urban planning. The evidence suggests they had a highly developed city life; many houses had wells and bathrooms supported by an elaborate underground drainage system. The population is estimated to have reached over 5 million. Along with ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, it was one of three early civilisations of the region. A 200-year drought that began around 2000 BC made agriculture unsustainable, and cities were gradually abandoned.

The list of civilization vanished by climate change could be continued by the Khmer Empire known from their capital Angkor Wat, or by the Norse Viking settlers who thrived Greenland during the medieval warm period.

The above mentioned three examples, climate change was local, its cause was independent of human action, and the civilizations affected could not anticipate the change in their natural environment and as a consequence of famines, they gradually move away. The challenge we face today is different. The climate change we induced is global and currently, there is no alternative location where humanity may thrive.

In the last 20 years, the advances in astrobiology provided some crucial parameters to Drake’s equation. This taught us that our civilization is not likely the first on a cosmic scale. There has been life before us on some other planets in some other planetary systems. On some of these worlds life most likely built rich and complex biospheres. Going further over the long history of the cosmos, life on some of those other worlds most likely, have woken up. It will have learned to think, to reason, and even to build its own project of civilization⁹.

When our attempt at civilization fails, Earth will still keep maintaining some level of life and will continue its development over the course of thousands of generations, guided by the rule of evolution as it did before. The mass extension that already happens is the 6th in Earth’s history and but the first induced by human actions.

Whether or not Earth will cross the Simpson-Nakajima limit when the runaway greenhouse effect will heat up the entire planet to vapor all the liquid water and make it inhabitable to almost all living organisms. It is good to keep in mind that in a few million years ahead — that is not a long time on a planetary scale

the traces of our precious culture and complex industrial civilization would be easy to miss in the geologic records, even when lasting 500 times longer than we have made it so far.

The extensive use of fertilizer that keeps 7 billion people fed, would be detectable as it redirects the planet’s flows of nitrogen into food production. The most future researchers should see this, in characteristics of nitrogen showing up in sediments from our era. Likewise our relentless hunger for the rare-Earth elements used in electronic gadgets¹⁰.

From this perspective, civilization becomes just another thing in the universe and the key to its success lies in the hand of our generations.

Historical time isn’t it? Not purely in terms of human history but in terms of the waste galaxy streching billion years back and ahead, experimenting with civilizations.

Humans have extreme adaptation capabilities, so it’s quite sure there will be some colony of the ancestors of the wealthiest who survive, the worst-case scenario in underground chambers eating plants, grown in vertical gardens that are enriched with artificially manufactured protein.

Can we fix it?

Climate change already happens and it will continue to escalate over the next few decades even when we stop emitting any further CO2 molecule right now. Despite this fact, we still have the chance to avoid consequences that would wipe out nature from the plane we know now.

There is quite some effort around solving the problem. The most prominent among solar geoengineering¹¹. It might buy us some time avoiding some of the consequences introduced by greenhouse gas emission, meanwhile might introduce some others that increase tension between nations. There are experiments transforming our manufacturing processes to consume CO2 instead of emission¹². The carbon-capture plantation is another trial. Storing atmospheric carbon in plants in forests or under the sea¹³ aims to tackle the problem but the scale in time and space and also the effect on a wider scale still not clear.

The scientific and technological developments we achieved at the prices of CO2 emission made us more aware both of the risk we face, and our influence on it so we now know

the next 50 years will determine the next 10,000 years If we consider environmental risks alone, the last 50 years of human activity have pushed us away from the environmental stability of the past 12,000 years.

[1] How Bad are Bananas?: The Carbon Footprint of Everything by Mike Berners-Lee ; May 2010

[2] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/05/this-animation-shows-how-the-earth-has-warmed-up-since-1850/

[3] Special report on Global Warming of 1.5 ºC https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/

[4] Steffen, W., et al. 2018. “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(33), 8252–8259

[5] Existential climate-related security risk: A scenario approach MAY 2019 Written By: David Spratt & Ian Dunlop Foreword By: Admiral Chris Barrie AC RAN Retired Breakthrough — National Centre for Climate Restoration

[6] Wariaro, V., et al. 2018. Global Catastrophic Risks 2018, Stockholm, Global Challenges Foundation

[7] Campbell, K.M., et al. 2007. The Age of Consequences: The foreign policy and national security implications of global climate change, Washington DC, Centre for Strategic and International Studies /Center for New American Security

[8] Wariaro, V., et al. 2018. Global Catastrophic Risks 2018, Stockholm, Global Challenges Foundation

[9] Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth” by Adam Frank; June 2018

[10] Was There a Civilization On Earth Before Humans? A look at the available evidence by Adam Frank, Apr 13, 2018, The Atlantic

[11] https://www.belfercenter.org/sites/default/files/2019-06/TechFactSheet/solargeoengineering%20-%205.pdf

[12] https://www.udel.edu/udaily/2019/august/feng-jiao-carbon-nitrogen-bonds-catalysis

[13] https://oceana.org/blog/seaweed-could-be-scrubbing-way-more-carbon-atmosphere-we-expected

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