CHAPTER 11
Climate Collapse: The Rogue Factor
From a presentation I gave to a Metro State College ethics class, November 2013. While some of the data here may be slightly outdated, the essence of the perspective remains sound. While Guy McPherson’s conclusions are highly controversial and provocative, his research appears to be impeccable. In my view, he is perhaps the most prolific reporter and interpreter of climate change research functioning today.
Before we go any farther and get to the real point of all this, I want to go back to the issue of global warming and climate collapse. And here I’m going to draw from an author who has gotten much attention lately, Guy McPherson, a former tenured professor and environmentalist at the University of Arizona who resigned his post there. He recently published a book about his journey, Walking Away from Empire,62 and he writes a blog called “Nature Bats Last.”63 And in fact, Guy was here in Boulder just a couple of weeks ago, where he said unequivocally, “The climate situation is much worse than we’ve been led to believe and is accelerating far more rapidly than accounted for by models.”
McPherson really got my attention when he gave the keynote address at the recent Bluegrass Bioneers conference in Louisville, Kentucky, in 2012—delivering the best summary of the latest climate science I’ve seen anywhere.64 McPherson’s main story is that global economic collapse is upon us—which is good news, because, as he says, “if we stop this omnicidal, suicidal set of living arrangements that we call industrial civilization, then that will actually force us to stop climate chaos.”
But what is this climate chaos, this climate collapse? What is happening, really? What is the truth that’s being kept from us?
In his presentation, McPherson sequentially lays out the most important scientific studies about climate change, and some of them we hadn’t even heard about. Here’s the progression:
1. In 2007, the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in their fourth assessment, conclude that global warming will produce a 1 degree Celsius temperature increase by 2010. That’s already catastrophic news, because a 1 degree global temperature increase, as they said, leads to “rapid, unpredictable, and non-linear responses that could lead to extensive ecosystem damage.”
2. A year later, in 2008, the Hadley Center for Meteorological Research—with more computational power and more data—concludes that we’re headed to a 2 degree Celsius warmer world by the end of this century. Two degrees is truly catastrophic, we now understand. Because of positive feedbacks, self-reinforcing feedback loops, 2 degrees leads almost immediately and with great certainty to 6 degrees Celsius.
3. Six months later, in mid 2009, the United Nations Environmental Program comes along and says we’re headed to a 3.5 degree Celsius warmer world by 2100.
4. Soon after, the Hadley Center, just a year after their first assessment, says, “four is the new two, and it’s coming by midcentury.” Four degrees Celsius is 7 degrees Fahrenheit. Remember, two leads to six. As McPherson says, “four is the last nail in the coffin of human experience.”
5. About the time of the Copenhagen climate change meetings, the Global Carbon Project and Copenhagen Diagnosis come up with 6 and 7 degrees Celsius warming by the end of the century.
6. The day after Thanksgiving in 2010, the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook says we’re headed to 3.5 degrees Celsius warmer by 2035.
7. In December of 2010, several weeks later, the United Nations Environment Program says we’re in for more than 5 degrees Celsius increase by 2050. McPherson reminds us that 5 degrees Celsius kills the oceans—they become so acidified that essentially nothing can live there, including the thermophiles found at incredible depths and at enormous temperatures.
8. Just after Thanksgiving in 2011, only a year after their previous assessment, the International Energy Agency (IEA) says 6 degrees Celsius by 2035. They later retract this, without explanation.
And I’ll add a couple more, even more recent than McPherson’s lineup.
1. The day before the presidential election, the global accounting group PricewaterhouseCoopers announces a major economic analysis predicting 6 degrees Celsius increase by the end of the century, with the admission that this could occur even sooner. As a result, they tell us, we can expect nothing less than economic devastation. That’s a showstopper, as they’re one of the most respected and influential financial institutions in the world. Did you read about this in the media? I didn’t think so.
2. And on November 6, 2012, in the United Kingdom, Dr. Kevin Anderson, deputy director of the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research (the United Kingdom’s premier climate modeling institution), speaking to a sold-out crowd at Bristol University’s Cabot Institute, says that our future is essentially not possible. He says we are almost guaranteed to go to 4 degrees Celsius warming and perhaps beyond that by 2050 (4 degrees is “beyond the point at which agriculture, the ecosystem, and industrial civilization can survive”), and that we’ll almost certainly hit 6 degrees no later than the end of this century. Four degrees, he says, “would be incompatible with an organized global community”—very nuanced language. The title of his speech was “Real Clothes for the Emperor: Facing the Challenges of Climate Change.” Did you read about this? Anderson accuses other scientists and government leaders of knowing all this but refusing to predict anything beyond a 2 degrees Celsius warming—a blatant cover-up, in other words. You can read all about this online, and hear his speech, at EcoShock Radio.
Just like the studies that McPherson cites, Anderson’s analysis doesn’t even take into account the effects of positive feedbacks, self-reinforcing feedback loops.
Recently, we’ve been reading about the new IPCC Fifth Assessment, which will be released next year. Did you read about it? Doesn’t sound as bad as we feared, does it?
However, the entire IPCC body of work fails to take into account positive feedbacks. This means that their projections are, to say it politely, ultraconservative. To be a little less polite, they’re extremely misleading. If we’re making our decisions based on IPCC data, we’re simply going in the wrong direction and radically underestimating our predicament. You could even make a pretty good case that the recent IPCC report is a cover-up. We don’t really need to go there, but we do need to listen to the scientists who are reporting positive feedbacks, the factors that are increasingly accelerating climate change and sending us toward a tipping point from which there is no return.
What are these positive feedbacks? They are the results of global warming—like the increase of water vapor in the atmosphere—that accelerate the rate of global warming itself.
McPherson told us in Boulder recently that from the scientific literature, he’s identified no fewer than twenty-seven major positive feedbacks, only two of which are reversible (i.e., “at a temporal scale relevant to our species”). He introduced these feedback loops with this caveat: “These feedbacks are not additive, they are multiplicative; they not only reinforce within a feedback, the feedbacks also reinforce among themselves.”65
1. rapid release of Arctic methane
2. warm Atlantic water defrosting the Arctic as it shoots through Fram Strait
3. Siberian methane vents growing to 1 kilometer across
4. 2010 Amazon drought triggering release of more carbon than in United States
5. peat in boreal forests decomposing
6. invasion of tall shrubs warming soil, destabilizing permafrost
7. Greenland ice darkening
8. Antarctic methane being released; melt rate catching up to Arctic
9. Russian forest and bog fires growing
10. cracking of glaciers accelerating in presence of increased carbon
11. the Beaufort Gyre reversed course
12. exposure to sunlight increasing conversion of exposed soil carbon, accelerating thawing of permafrost
13. microbes in melting permafrost eating carbon and producing more heat
14. summer ice melt in Antarctica is highest level in a thousand years
15. floods in Canada sending silty water into the Beaufort Sea
16. surface meltwater draining through cracks in ice sheets, warming them from the inside
17. Heinrich Event anticipated in Greenland
18. breakdown of thermohaline conveyor belt affecting Antarctic, melting permafrost
19. loss of Arctic sea ice causing the jet stream to slow and meander, producing weather blocks
20. Arctic ice growing darker, hence less reflective
21. extreme weather events exacerbating climate change
22. ocean acidification reducing the release of radiation-shielding dimethyl sulfide by plankton
23. sea-level rise causing slope collapse, tsunamis, and release of methane
24. rising ocean temps reducing plankton (upsetting natural cycles of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and phosphorus)
25. warming triggering earthquakes, which trigger methane release
26. Arctic drilling fast-tracked by Obama administration
27. supertankers taking advantage of slushy Arctic
The one that we’ve been paying the most attention to recently comes from a collaboration of scientists who call themselves the Arctic Methane Emergency Group. Just last week they issued a report that starts off powerfully.
While we go about our day, working, taking care of our family and doing life, a crisis that many are unaware of is unfolding in the Arctic that … will affect every living thing on Earth, including us. As recently as of Monday, October 28, 2013, consistently high levels of methane have been detected through the methane tracker that the Arctic News monitors. Not only will the Arctic soon be ice-free, but something far worse and a symptom of climate change is happening in real-time: This methane, previously stored for millions of years in frozen clathrates deep below the ocean, is starting to be released at a staggering rate in October, alarming scientists and researchers worldwide.66
One of the climate scientists in the group, Paul Beckwith, at the University of Ottawa, predicted a year ago that because of positive feedbacks, especially methane release, we could see a 6 degree Celsius temperature increase—nearly 11 degrees Fahrenheit—within the next ten years. That’s incredibly fast, and it’s quite possible he’s right. Actually, we’re starting to see a number of predictions clustering around 4 to 6 degrees Celsius in the next decade or so.
There’s more.67 The Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, one of the premier science journals in the world, published a paper titled “Climate Change Is Irreversible,” finding that the atmospheric level of carbon dioxide concentration today—we recently hit a record four hundred parts per million—will be the minimum level we will experience for at least the next thousand years. This is the highest level of carbon in the atmosphere in three million years.
About all this, McPherson said, “350.org is a bad joke. It’s disingenuous, or ignorant. There’s no way we’ll see 350 parts per million carbon dioxide within at least the next thousand years. Promoting that as if we could get there is ridiculous.”
We’ve been setting records with our carbon emissions. According to the United Nation’s Environmental Program, during 2008—the most catastrophic year of the Great Recession—carbon emissions rose to their highest level since we fully implemented the Clean Air Act in this country. In 2009, we increased carbon emissions over that record by an additional 6.2 percent. In 2010, we increased carbon emissions 6.5 percent over that, and in 2011, we continued the trend with an increase of 3.4 percent. The results for 2012 will be similar, and they’re just starting to come in. Even though we’re in an economic Great Recession, our carbon emissions keep going up. No matter what we’ve been doing to stop this, it’s obviously not nearly enough. And almost no one is talking about this.
In February of 2011, scientist Tim Garrett, from the University of Utah, was finally able to publish an important paper in Climatic Change, one of the premier journals in the climate sciences, titled “Are There Basic Physical Constraints on Future Anthropogenic Emissions of Carbon Dioxide?”68 He had submitted this paper in 2007, but it took four years for it to be accepted. His argument is that only economic collapse will prevent runaway global climate change.
Finally, research by the Arctic Methane Emergency Group indicates that in 2010, methane emissions into the atmosphere have gone exponential. We’ve reached a tipping point.
Malcolm Light, the author of this group’s paper, titled “Global Extinction within One Human Lifetime as a Result of Spreading Atmospheric Arctic Methane Heat Wave and Surface Firestorm,”69 says that this process will “release huge quantities of methane into the atmosphere and lead to the demise of all life on earth before the middle of this century.” And he even gets rather specific about this, estimating that life in the Southern Hemisphere will end in 2047. But life in the Northern Hemisphere will end first, in 2031.
Of course, these are just predictions. And as quantum physicist Niels Bohr once famously said, “Predictions are difficult, especially about the future.”
But one of the patterns we see here is that year after year, scientists’ worst-case scenarios are being exceeded by the data of what’s actually happened.
The point that we need to get is that this is the direction in which we are headed. It’s runaway climate change—climate collapse. And every year, the more data and the better models we have, the worse it looks. This is what the world that we’re inheriting looks like.
Now, I’d like you to take a deep breath.
Richard Heinberg once said that almost every book or presentation about these issues ends with what he calls “a mandatory message of hope.” But then he tries to get us to focus on the realities by saying, “My mandatory message of hope is there is no hope—for a soft landing or more of the same or business as usual or perpetual growth or normal life, as we’ve come to know it.… But isn’t that good news?”
Well, yes, I think it is. Don’t you?
And I’ll follow that with something from James Howard Kunstler that has meant a lot to us: “Hope is not a consumer product. You have to generate your own hope. You do that by demonstrating to yourself that you are brave enough to face reality and competent enough to deal with the circumstances it presents. How we will manage to uphold a decent society in the face of extraordinary change will depend on our creativity, our generosity, and our kindness, and I am confident that we can find these resources within our own hearts, and collectively in our communities.”70
As you may know, Kunstler is hardly a Pollyanna, but he’s pointing to something crucial.
Okay, you’ve just had a concentrated dose of reality, the truth about our predicament. Can you see this? Can you feel this? Didn’t you sort of know this already? Are you surprised that you don’t hear about all this in the media? Are you surprised that people aren’t talking about this everywhere?
I remember hearing a Canadian scientist say a few years ago, “I don’t understand you Americans. You say you stand for freedom and justice and what’s right in the world. So why aren’t you rioting in the streets over all this?”
Here’s the thing, as Arundhati Roy wrote in her book Power Politics, “The trouble is that once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And once you’ve seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There’s no innocence. Either way, you’re accountable.”71
I’m sorry to say, this all winds up in our lap. Twenty years from now, life on this planet will be unrecognizable compared to what it is today. And what life becomes on this planet—if there is to be any life at all—will basically be up to us. Industrial civilization is already over, dead. We know that in our hearts, don’t we? And we also know that whatever civilization comes next—if there is to be any at all—will be up to us.
In Eaarth, Bill McKibben writes, “We may, with commitment and luck, yet be able to maintain a planet that will sustain some kind of civilization, but it won’t be the same planet, and hence it can’t be the same civilization. The earth that we knew—the only earth that we ever knew—is gone.”72
This is what we call an evolutionary threshold. It’s a moment when the old destroys itself and something new comes to birth. As Bioneers founder Kenny Ausubel says, it’s a moment of enlightenment.
When I say it’s up to us, I don’t mean our generation or our tribe or our people. I’m talking about us specifically, the people here in this room.73
What if this is actually true? If you knew it all came down to you, what would you do? If you knew it all came down to you, it wouldn’t matter if you felt inadequate, unprepared, or even pissed off or just depressed. If you really knew that it all came down to you, you would do whatever you had to do. Wouldn’t you? I believe you would.
That is your situation. That’s our situation, for each of us. It’s up to each of us. It’s up to you. And it’s up to me. It’s up to us. Us.
This is why, for instance, Lynette Marie and I are doing everything humanly possible to build the ways to feed our local population in Colorado, all five million of us, because our global food supply chain is just about to collapse and leave a lot of people here very hungry unless we quickly learn to provision ourselves locally.
Localizing the global food supply is the issue that pulled us out of our lives and into a totally unexpected mission—one that seems extremely urgent, overwhelming, and, at times, just downright impossible. But that’s the mission that has come to us, even though we have no visible qualifications for doing such a thing. Yes, there are a lot of other people working on this, but it all comes down to us. And each of them. And we all know it. We know that if we don’t do it, if we don’t do it together, it won’t happen. There’s no second string to send into the game should we fail. And we very well might fail.