Unimaginable?

David Wallace-Wells takes a long look at what climate change may have in store for us.

[W]hen it comes to contemplating real-world warming dangers, we suffer from an incredible failure of imagination. The reasons for that are many: the timid language of scientific probabilities, which the climatologist James Hansen once called “scientific reticence” in a paper chastising scientists for editing their own observations so conscientiously that they failed to communicate how dire the threat really was; the fact that the country is dominated by a group of technocrats who believe any problem can be solved and an opposing culture that doesn’t even see warming as a problem worth addressing; the way that climate denialism has made scientists even more cautious in offering speculative warnings; the simple speed of change and, also, its slowness, such that we are only seeing effects now of warming from decades past; our uncertainty about uncertainty, which the climate writer Naomi Oreskes in particular has suggested stops us from preparing as though anything worse than a median outcome were even possible; the way we assume climate change will hit hardest elsewhere, not everywhere; the smallness (two degrees) and largeness (1.8 trillion tons) and abstractness (400 parts per million) of the numbers; the discomfort of considering a problem that is very difficult, if not impossible, to solve; the altogether incomprehensible scale of that problem, which amounts to the prospect of our own annihilation; simple fear.

Is it obligatory to inject some sense of optimism?

[C]limate scientists have a strange kind of faith: We will find a way to forestall radical warming, they say, because we must.

But the eight implications discussed are overwhelming:  heat death comes from the combination of higher temperatures and humidity that make a region uninhabitable; the end of food refers to shifting climate zones where heat and drought reduce productivity; climate plagues come from reanimated ancient micro-organisms; unbreathable air is a result of particulate pollution and shifting wind patterns; perpetual war from the social stress associated with climate refugees; permanent economic collapse due to the end of value-adding fossil fuel consumption; poisoned oceans as a result of acidification; and last, the great filter as a philosophical perspective.

What lies in store for us is more like what the Victorian anthropologists identified as “dreamtime,” or “everywhen”: the semi-mythical experience, described by Aboriginal Australians, of encountering, in the present moment, an out-of-time past, when ancestors, heroes, and demigods crowded an epic stage. You can find it already watching footage of an iceberg collapsing into the sea — a feeling of history happening all at once.

Several of the scientists I spoke with proposed global warming as the solution to Fermi’s famous paradox, which asks, If the universe is so big, then why haven’t we encountered any other intelligent life in it? The answer, they suggested, is that the natural life span of a civilization may be only several thousand years, and the life span of an industrial civilization perhaps only several hundred. In a universe that is many billions of years old, with star systems separated as much by time as by space, civilizations might emerge and develop and burn themselves up simply too fast to ever find one another.

Update (July 14):  More ways to stay awake at night.

Update (July 24):  Robert Hunziker describes the climate wake-up call.

Update (July 28):  A Chatham House report called "Chokepoints and Vulnerabilities in Global Food Trade" describes how trade in the four major crops--corn, wheat, rice, and soybeans--depends on just 14 critical transportation junctures.

Imagine the following frightening-yet-plausible scenario: What if the next time Russia’s wheat harvest is devastated by drought, other major food producers are also facing struggles with severe weather and wrecked harvests? In the United States, that could mean a freak flood season that wipes out inland waterways or overwhelms coastal ports.

Brazil, the world’s other heavy-hitter, accounts for 17 percent of global wheat, maize, rice and soybean exports. But its road network is crumbling. Extreme rainfall could knock out a major transport route. If this happened together with a U.S. flood and a Russian drought, there would be global food shortages, riots and political instability, starvation in areas that are heavily dependent on imports, and recessions everywhere else.

Update (December 24, 2019):  David Wallace-Wells tries to clarify what is meant by a "business as usual" emissions scenario suggesting that one frequently used relies on an unrealistic coal consumption projection and so amounts to more of a worst case scenario. But it's a kind of good news/bad news situation. While the worst case is looking to be less likely, we are also using up the carbon budget that would keep warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius.

The math — ten years left at current emissions — is actually bleaker than it might seem at first, since running through ten years at the current rate would only land us at 1.5 degrees if, immediately thereafter, we went all the way to zero, never again emitting another ounce of carbon, let alone a gigaton, of which we are today producing, from industrial processes and fossil-fuel burning, 37 each year. A gigaton is, keep in mind, a billion tons. Which makes not just 1.5 degrees but, I think, 2 degrees, for all practical purposes out of reach. As a reminder, this is a level of warming that the IPCC has called "catastrophic" and the island nations of the world have described as "genocide".