When change gets scary

An article about climate change and global warming

In a movie starring Ethan Hawke that I recently watched, a man killed himself. The cause of his suicidal tendency wasn’t so much the depressive state of his life but more that of the Earth’s fight against climate change. The thing about the Earth's fight with climate change is that we humans don’t seem to be fighting back.

Here’s the context.

Ethan Hawke’s character is sitting in a room with the ‘soon to be dead’ man. They are making small talk. Ethan has been invited over by the man’s wife who is pregnant. The man wants his wife to get an abortion. Why? Ethan is here to find out and perhaps talk him out of it.

The man’s character looks uneasy and nervous.

Ethan looks like he is about to try to talk a man out of persuading his wife to perform an abortion, he doesn’t look like he believes he will succeed.

But he must try, he promised the wife.

“How old are you?” The man asks Ethan.

“I am 46" Ethan responds and there is a nervous pause. The entire air is nervous. It is obvious neither of these men knows how to start this conversation they know they must have.

“33.” The man says. “That’s how old our child will be in the year 2050. Two years older than I am now. You will be 81...”

Forced laughter.

“Do you know what the world will look like in 2050” … “one-third of the natural world will be destroyed in your lifetime. The Earth’s temperature will be 3 degrees centigrade higher, flooring the threshold. Severe, widespread and irreversible impacts and when scientists say stuff like that…”

You get the drift right? The man continues on like this for a bit listing the things going to shit in the world, the natural world. By 2050, sea levels higher by 2 feet in the East Coast, Low lying areas underwater across the world. Bangladesh, 20% loss of landmass. Central Africa, 50% loss of crops due to drought. Western reservoirs dried up, climate change, refugees, epidemic, extreme weather…

“The bad times, they will begin and from that point, everything will move very quickly” … “ and this isn’t in like some distant future, you will live to see this” … “I thought things could change, I thought people would listen” … “ how do you sanction bringing a child, full of hope and naive beliefs, who grows up to be a young woman that one day looks you in the eye and says ‘you knew this all along, didn’t you?”

This conversation shows how unready the man is to bring a child into our world. From his point of view, human life is at a point where it could seize to exist in the foreseeable future and he cannot rationalise bringing a child into this world to face that eventuality. The conversation that unfolds in this scene explores the manner of despair that causes a man to be blinded to the beauty of bringing a child into this world but instead to focus on the chance that his generation is ruining the Earth for everyone. This is a type of despair only the fear of climate change can cause. Eventually, he does kill himself and the wife doesn’t get that abortion.

The biggest points of this man’s feelings towards climate change are

1. It’s real and it’s bad.
2. People aren’t doing anything to stop it. They are making it worse.

So here is the point where I oversimplify things in order to pass across some information that I know only a little about. Starting with what Climate change is. There is something I found curious as I began the google search for this project. In my mind, I think of climate change and global warming to be more or less the same thing. I assume that a lot of people do the same and I assume that doing so might be wrong. The research I did, however, shows that it is not entirely wrong to use the two terms interchangeably. In some situations, especially as they are used in popular media, the choice of terms depends on the perception of the target audience. For instance, research has shown that people prefer the term ‘climate change’ to ‘global warming’ because climate change doesn’t sound as scary as the term ‘global warming’. Nobody wants to imagine the warming of the globe, that doesn't feel like it can have many positive effects on the world. Climate change, on the other hand, feels less tragic, less drastic. A simple change in climate couldn’t be that bad except of course that it can. When something, as defined as the climate, starts to change, that can’t be good for two reasons.

1. If the climate suddenly changes behaviour, we suddenly lose the ability to predict it and a lot about human lifestyle depends on our ability to predict climate.
2. If the climate begins to change, it will take a lot to change it back.

This is why the man from earlier has those two main points of fear. If climate change is real, we need to stop it from getting worse because if we can’t, we definitely won’t be able to turn it back. Let’s define the terms.

Climate Change refers to a change in the Earth’s climate systems resulting in a change in weather patterns attributed largely to increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide produced by the use of fossil fuels.

Global warming is a long-term rise in the average temperature of the Earth’s climate system and increases in global temperature also attributed to increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide produced by the use of fossil fuels.

Definitions are nice and all but in some situations much like the one we find ourselves in, they don’t actually explain what we need to know.

Here’s what you need to know about climate change and global warming.

They are both caused by the burning of fossil fuels. The burning of fossil fuels leads to the production of co2 aka carbon dioxide. That carbon dioxide enters into the Earth’s atmosphere and just sort of stays there. There is a carbon dioxide cycle which is supposed to help maintain a balance in the amount of co2 in the atmosphere but humans are currently producing more co2 than the natural cycle can handle.

But how does this translate into global warming?

This is our star, we (English speakers) call it the sun. It’s a big ball of energy. It is the biggest thing in our solar system and it is 99% of the mass in our solar system. That’s how ridiculously big it is. It is the main source of light and heat which makes it pretty important for lives on Earth (our planet). The thing is that the sun is really far away from us (roughly 150 million kilometres away). If there was a road from Earth to the Sun with a speed limit of 100km/hr, it would take 1.5 million hours or 171 years to get there. Of course, people can’t actually drive to the sun because there are no filling stations on the way (yup, that’s the main problem.) There is also the problem of having a vacuum between the Earth and the sun. This is important when thinking of how the heat from the sun gets to the Earth. There are three ways with which heat can be transferred from one medium to the other: conduction, convection and radiation. The first two require materials because they involve actual movement of hot particles from one location to another. The third, radiation, is how heat from the sun gets to the earth. When that heat gets to the earth, some of it enters the atmosphere but a lot of it is radiated back into space in the form of infrared energy. The main components of the atmosphere: Nitrogen and Oxygen, have molecules that contain only two atoms. They don’t absorb heat because of their tight bonds. CO2 however, contains three atoms and is weakly bonded meaning it absorbs heat. It traps heat in the Earth’s atmosphere and bounces that heat back to the planet which leads to warming which is good normally. This phenomenon is known as the greenhouse effect and it’s what is preventing the Earth from constantly being about -18% but we are currently producing way more co2 than we should for the sake of the planet.

Global warming as a term is referring to the warming of the entire globe from the oceans to the planet surface temperature to the atmospheric temperature. It’s all of these things. Since the beginning of the industrial age in the 1800s, the Earth’s global temperature has risen by 0.8-degree centigrade and 2/3rd of that increase has happened since 1970.

You are probably thinking that 0.8 is not that much but it takes a lot to increase the global temperature by any amount. The last time the temperature of the earth dropped by 1-degree centigrade, we had an ice age. A 5-degree drop had most of North America covered in ice for 20,000 years.

The real difference between Climate change and global warming is evident when we consider the other effects of having a warmer Earth. Things like increased sea levels, more extreme weather conditions, ice mass loss in the Arctic, Antartica and Greenland. Basically, climate change is referring to the mess and global warming is the cause of the mess. They are two sides to the same coin.

Is climate change real?

There is evidence to show that it is but we somehow live in a time when evidence is not enough. We also live in a time when evidence can be presented to support both sides of any debate. It is one of the really perplexing and confusing parts of the vaccination debate. There are some really smart people that have written really good papers on why we shouldn’t vaccinate but that is beside the point. Thing is climate change is real and there are parts of it that are inarguable. Eg, the Earth is hotter and is getting hotter. Another is the sea levels are rising and the ice glaciers are getting smaller. We can see these things and things you can see are generally harder to pretend like they are not true. It doesn’t mean that people don’t try to ignore them.

The thing that we can’t see and therefore pretend about is that we are the ones causing them. The planetary temperature has been known to rise and fall naturally so what then is the assurance that we are the ones causing it? This paper and this paper and this paper and this paper and every single paper here. Like I said already, there is no scarcity of evidence that climate change is happening and that it is happening because of carbon dioxide and we are the ones producing the carbon dioxide.

Why do some people think it isn’t?

“Climate change was a hoax invented by the Chinese to make the US manufacturing less competitive”

Word for word, this is a direct quote from the current US president, Donald Trump. He said this in 2012. In 2013, he called global warming an expensive hoax. In an interview just after he was sworn in, he said he believed that there might be a connection between human action and climate change but in 2015, he pulled out of the UN agreement to reduce global temperature by 1.5-degree before 2030. Basically, the man is all over the place and he isn’t the only one. There are many people who either don’t believe that climate change is real or don’t believe that humans are causing it but these people aren’t as clueless as Trump. Some of these people have ‘evidence’:

Scepticism has been developed among groups of people because the scientists that are supposed to be showing us the way can’t seem to be able to get their shit together. Just before all the craze was Global warming this and that, scientists were clamouring about global cooling. Another point is that there is historical evidence showing that in the past, planetary temperature rise preceded co2 rather the other way around. This implies that the rise in temperature was a cause and not a result of co2 levels increasing. Many sceptics are also wary that asides from the ice glaciers and sea levels, everything else that scientists present in their debate of climate change are extravagant computer models.

At the end of the day, the issue here isn’t so much as whether one side of the debate is correct or not. The way science is structured, people are meant to challenge theories and findings and people will always do that. It is the only way that science has progressed so far and it is the only way it will continue to progress. In the meantime, Climate change is real. The evidence says so. Of course, you can find evidence saying it is not but you can find evidence for anything these days.

How bad is it?

19 of the hottest years in recorded history have occurred in the last 20 years.

19!

That’s incredible. There are 5,000 years in recorded history. Do you know the odds of that happening? Very unlikely. This could be a random coincidence but it’s probably not.

I am actually supposed to go on and on at this point about all the terrible things that climate change means for us but I am not going to. Why? The internet already does that for you. The media spends a lot of time spreading the message about how we are doomed if we don’t start doing something different and it makes sense. It makes sense that in an attempt to drive action, they are trying to create panic but that doesn’t work. Studies have shown that fear acts as a good motivator to drive inaction and hope is a better motivator to drive action. Like with cigarette boxes, the idea of death is thrust in your face to deter you from doing the action.

However, the thing to remember is that, if climate change continues at its current rate, things can get really bad. How bad? There have been 12 hurricanes since 2000. There were 5 in the twenty years before that and 7 in the twenty years before that.

Should we kill ourselves?

No. Don’t do that. Please don’t do that. Talk to someone, probably not Ethan Hawke’s character from the movie I watched.

What should we actually think?

Ethan Hawke’s character wasn’t a bad guy. He wasn’t the cause of the man’s suicide although he probably began to feel that way seeing as the man killed himself after their conversation. But that man had already lived in despair for so long that Ethan’s intervention wasn’t going to be the thing that stopped him from going down the part he was going down. Another thing about that conversation was that Ethan was a priest (one struggling with his own beliefs) and he knew very little of the topic. By the end of the conversation they had, the man had caused Ethan to have more despair about climate change than he previously did than any effect Ethan had on the man.

One of the podcasts I listen to is “DearHankandJohn” in which two brothers answer questions sent in by listeners. Last week, someone asked the following question:

“… This past year, reading about the climate crisis has been super scary for obvious reasons. It has also sourly affected my creative drive because I didn’t realise how much it meant to me that my art, however insignificant it might be, live on without me. How do you cope with the idea that we might be the last generation and therefore the art we make might only live for as long as we do…”

John Green (author of the fault in our stars) gave this response:

“… here’s the thing anonymous, we are not going to be the last generation of humans. Catastrophising the effects of climate change doesn’t do anyone any good because what all it does is it makes us feel apathetic”

You don’t care enough about Climate change. Yes you, reading this article. You don’t know what to do to stop climate change because you haven’t cared enough to read about it. You’ve heard that there are hurricanes elsewhere and that there are heatwaves elsewhere and that there’s famine elsewhere but it’s not your business.

“… it makes our obsolescence feel inevitable which it isn’t and it puts us in a place of inertia rather than in a place of we have an opportunity here to limit the effects of climate change...”

And if you do care about it, you only care enough to know that it is happening but not enough to care what to do about it. In the extreme case of caring, you care enough to feel absolutely devasted about what climate change means for our future and you feel like that future is inevitable. Which it isn’t.

“…like going into a place of absolute despair will be fine with me if it made people productive but it doesn’t and the kind of response like ‘oh this a big terrifying problem, let’s give up’ is exactly the wrong response. It’s also not supported by the data.”

Fear is only a good motivator for inaction. Being afraid of the future climate change will cause isn’t caring, it’s resigning and there’s no reason to do that. The right emotion is hope and I am going to give you a reason to have it.

Sometime during the 1980s, scientists noticed that there was a hole in the ozone layer. You know the ozone layer, it’s that part of the stratosphere that shields the Earth from the ultraviolet rays of the sun. The scientists found out that chemicals being used in the making of refrigerants were the main cause of the depletion and so in 1987, the Montreal Protocol was signed into action. Since then, the ozone damage has reduced significantly and humans are in a much better place now than where would have been if we had resigned to the big bad ozone depletion.

Climate change is real and is bad and all that other stuff but that’s only half of the story. The other half is that we can stop it, it won’t be the first time that the entire world was facing the same problem and if the ozone layer debacle is anything to learn from, we know that humans have the ability to fight for a joint interest. Humans have an immense capacity for hope and that’s a good start.

Thank you for reading all the way to the end.

Plug (cool stuff on the internet)

You should listen to the podcast by John and Hank Green. https://dearhankandjohn.libsyn.com/ You can also find them on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, Spotify and anywhere you listen to podcasts.

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