It's the end of the world as we know it

It's hard to say just when humanity stopped trying to prevent climate change. Some say only a few prescient individuals ever really took the threat seriously until the dramatic events of 2012. But by then, of course, it was too late to do anything about it. Still, if we have to pinpoint a specific time that the public conversation began to switch from how to avoid catastrophic global warming to learning to live with the consequences, 2008 would be as good a candidate as any.

It had only been a couple of years since almost-president Al Gore had awoken the American people from their slumber about the climate crisis with his slide show ;;;;; a vision of the future that with the hindsight of 30 years appears hopelessly optimistic and naive. But the awareness he generated didn't get much of a chance to turn into action. It was during the first half of that year, the last Olympic year, that the op-ed pages of the newspapers and certain corners of the blogosphere started to embrace the meme that mitigation is no longer an option. Instead, the talk turned to adaptation.

Such talk came in three strains. First was the idea that there still is a technological solution that could forestall climate change, or even reverse the process. The plan was to remove the carbon dioxide that was trapping all that heat in the lower atmosphere instead of letting it to radiate back into space. "Solving global warming with giant vacuums" was a typical headline in papers with more imaginative science sections, such as the Los Angeles Times. The journalists were entranced with the possibility of building massive "orchards" of CO2 filters that would scrub the gas from air, undoing the product of 150 years of fossil-fuel consumption. Reading the story now gives one a sense of that early tinge of desperation:

[Klaus Lackner, a physicist at Columbia University] estimates that sucking up the current stream of emissions would require about 67 million boxcar-sized filters at a cost of trillions of dollars a year. ...Lackner calculated that sucking up all 28 billion tons of CO2 released worldwide each year would require spreading out his machines over a land area the size of Arizona.

That seems like a reasonable sacrifice to save civilization ...

How quaint it all seems now. Now that we know just how difficult it is to find a place to store all that scrubbed CO2.

The second stream of adaptationist thinking came in the form of geoengineering on a grand scale, scales that would make the CO2 filter farms look modest by comparison. An essay by Mike Tidwell in Orion magazine is a typical example. It begins by admitting that...

...it's time to face a fundamental truth: the majority of the world's climate scientists have been totally wrong. They've failed us completely. Not concerning the basics of global warming. Of course the climate is changing. Of course humans are driving the process through fossil fuel combustion and deforestation. No, what the scientists have been wrong about--and I mean really, really wrong--is the speed at which it's all occurring. Our climate system isn't just "changing." It's not just "warming." It's snapping, violently, into a whole new regime right before our eyes. A fantastic spasm of altered weather patterns is crashing down upon our heads right now.

Tidwell's answer, reluctantly reached, was to inject enormous quantities of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere in hopes of seeding cloud cover, which would reflect solar radiation before it can get into Greenhouse Earth. Sure it has risks, he argued,

But like it or not, we are where we are. And I, for one, can't look my ten-year-old son in the eye and, using a different sort of ideological arrogance, say, No, don't even try atmospheric engineering. We've learned our lesson. Just let catastrophic global warming run its course.

The third approach was less a solution than a surrender. It took many forms, but one advocated by military analyst Barry Zellen was among the earliest cases of the "How I learned to stop worrying and love global warming" syndrome. Writing in Canada's Globe and Mail, he describes an optimistic view of what an ice-free Arctic would mean.

Climate-change pessimists worry about increased resource competition, coastal flooding, infrastructure damage from melting permafrost, changes in wildlife migration patterns, and stresses on some species -especially polar bears - as well as on the indigenous cultures of the region.

But climate-change optimists imagine a world where international shipping can take a direct northern route, linking Asian, North American and European markets, cutting the consumption of fuel and reducing carbon emissions by using substantially shorter shipping routes; they foresee tremendous potential for maritime commerce to stimulate the economic development of Arctic ports, from the Port of Churchill on Hudson Bay to the depressed coastal communities of the High Arctic.

Secure sea lanes across the top will enable shipping of strategic commodities - whether North Slope and North Sea oil, strategic minerals from Nunavut to the Yukon North Slope, or a slew of Russian exports from the Kola peninsula to the Lena River basin - without the risks associated with current sea lanes and their vulnerable chokepoints, from the Strait of Malacca to the Panama Canal to the Red Sea.

Zellen's vision would have come to pass, of course, and sooner than most predicted, seeing as the end of summer ice in the Arctic Ocean was only three years away. But like the CO2 scrubber fans, and Tidwell's geoengineering scheme, his acceptance of higher carbon levels in the air completely ignored what we now know was the real threat to civilization.

That would be the effects on the ocean ecosystems. While it is relatively easy to suck CO2 from, or spray sulfur dioxide into, the air, neither did anything about acidification of the oceans, which would continue to absorb CO2 even after atmospheric emissions stopped growing (thanks to the economic collapse). This surprised many climatologists, some of whom had expected the oceans were near a CO2 saturation point. But there you have it. Even the most sophisticated geoengineering technique would have done nothing too late to stop the acidification trend, which still had several years left to run, and which led to the collapse of the planktonic base of an ocean food web already stressed by decades of overfishing.

Combined with the loss of food crops due to the short-lived but disastrous experiment in biofuels, the food riots, refugee crisis, and ultimately the economic crisis itself, were inevitable.

One might ask: weren't these writers, and the many others that would follow, right? Maybe. Maybe not. There's simply no way to know. Maybe if more people had paid attention to the Al Gores and the James Hansens of the time ;;;;; and we had cut greenhouse-gas emissions sharply beginning in 2008 ;;;;; we still would have had a chance of avoiding the worst-case scenarios. Maybe. Maybe not. But that's all moot now, isn't it?

There are still some who argue that the Gore-Hansen strategy, as correct as we now know it to be, was too far ahead of the science for the politicians to embrace. And maybe that's true. Not every climatologist and glacialogist of the early 2000s agreed with Hansen's fears. For example, in a chapter he contributed to a Wildlife Conservation Society publication "The State of the Wild" in 2008, Hansen made bold claims such as:

We are at the tipping point because the climate state includes large, ready positive feedbacks provided by the Arctic sea ice, the West Antarctic ice sheet, and much of Greenland's ice.

The accuracy of his timetable was just pure luck, say the scientists who at the time were denouncing the lack of sufficient evidence to support such statements. Plenty of climatologists said the tipping points were still decades off, or at least, there's no way we could be sure just how far off those points were. And if the science wasn't complete, how can you condemn people for refusing to make the huge sacrifices that everyone believed (wrongly) would come with shutting down all the coal-fired plants? After all, there was no way to know for certain that the alternative would be far worse.

But the real lesson to be drawn from the failures of the first decade of the 21st century is not that we should have tried harder to nail down the science of climate change. Uncertainty isn't always a bad thing, and the uncertainty of the computer models wasn't an excuse for inaction. On the contrary, that uncertainty should have spurred action. Because by 2008 what we were uncertain about wasn't whether the climate was changing for the worse, but just how bad things were, how fast they were going to get worse and whether or not we had already passed the point of no return.

The fact is, back then, we didn't know if it was too late, and yet we began to act as if it was. We didn't even try to do the right thing.