A Tipping Point Wobbles
It's been what feels like ages since we've talked about my bread and butter subject: climate change. And it's high time that we did, seeing as there's plenty of news to dig into on the matter. We will probably break this across a couple newsletters, but for the first I want to focus on–or rather, zoom out on–climate change as it stands broadly.
Here at When/If, I called the cause lost or damn near some time ago–at least a couple years, I think? And that's not to tell you to quit fighting, to quit living, or to even quit reducing your footprint and working to reduce everybody's. It's to say that we can't put the bullet back in the barrel. There is, I suspect (and many scientists with a little less funding and popularity than Michael Mann postulate), simply too much CO2 already in the atmosphere–too much momentum, if you will, for us or the planet to change course without some kind of miraculous intervening event.
This suspicion is borne out on the daily by reports like this one, that state the "safe" threshold for warming re: the world's ice sheets is lower than suspected. This is, to put it mildly, quite bad. What this report states, essentially, is that one of the world's climate tipping points is far closer to toppling.
Some Climate Realism for the New Folks
There are quite a few climate scientists and news mouthpieces who will tell you that it's not too late to stop climate change, or that we're dozens of years or a hundred years away from it becoming a deadly problem. Even the report above operates on a timescale of hundreds of years–which makes sense, as climatic time is closer to geologic time than human, right? Climate cycles in the thousands of years, if not millions, and very rarely does it abruptly change.
And yet, it has. And it is. You have to go back millions of years to reach atmospheric CO2 levels comparable to ours today*, but only a hundred to find relatively stable CO2 levels across a "normal" timescale. And said millions of years ago, the world was hotter–the kind of heat we talk about apocalyptically today. 3°C above modern temperatures, and a full 4°C above pre-industrial levels. 4°C is actually, truly apocalyptic. It ends agriculture as we know it, floods every coastal city and then some, causes massive amounts of migration, starvation, conflict, and basically just ruins your whole day.
That's the CO2 in our atmosphere right now. That's reality. The people that promise you we're only at +1.2°C** are kidding themselves when the last two years have seen temperatures over +1.5°C and we're likely to see a third this year. The idea that this was artificially inflated by El Niño is a joke–for one, artificial how, exactly? and for two, we even managed a La Niña this year and it still didn't dip our temperatures the way we hoped.
Keeping temperatures where they are now, or lowering them, requires removing carbon from the atmosphere or geoengineering. Carbon capture technology is nowhere near where it needs to be–it effectively doesn't exist–and geoengineering is as likely to wreck the planet as climate change. There is no magical way out of this. No billionaire inventor is going to figure it out. We can't all fly to Mars to pretend we're a successful civilization.
**That is, 1.2°C over the pre-industrial average world temperature.
The New News
Drawing our attention back to the above-linked report, the reason we should be concerned when I've already said the whole world is on fire and every dog in it is specifically mad at you, is that by pushing our heat threshold lower, we push our clock forward. The world isn't at 4°C yet, nor 3°C. But if the world's ice sheets collapse earlier than previously anticipated, this means that our world gets to 3 and 4°C faster. It means the coasts flood faster. Climate migration numbers in the millions start sooner.
It's worth saying, too, as many headlines point out, that meeting our target temperature of +1.5°C means we still lose the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. We should hope for this target, even if it's all but impossible, because it's certainly better than the alternative. But, as I've made clear, I don't think it's gonna happen.
The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are, as stated, one of the world's tipping points. How tipping points work is, one goes, then they all go. The report, let's be brass tacks about it, says the ice sheets have done tipped. That's extrapolation, but it's not an uninformed statement. With the ice sheets tipped, sea levels are going to rise. That doesn't mean Miami underwater next week or next year, but it does mean Miami underwater. It means Miami underwater eventually, and tides wrecking infrastructure, destroying homes, ruining lives, until then. And to reiterate, it means all the other tipping points are closer to jumping ship, too. Having less ice means the world's albedo lowers, which means the planet absorbs more solar radiation–which is, of course, a vicious cycle.
I will keep writing about these sorts of headlines and studies, not because the ultimate conclusion changes, but because it matters that we have an accurate timeline. It matters that you know that while Trump is only going to speed us along, Harris wasn't going to stop the clock. The next Dem to try to position themselves as our saving grace won't do it, either–should such a figure have the capacity to arise. There's no undoing this. There's only learning, accepting, and fighting to save everything we can.
Next Week and Other Futures
We've established–or re-established, for the folks who've been here a while–that we're in for a long, hard, hot fight with climate change, and that the clock has been moved up on some of its worse effects–even if the report is talking centuries rather than decades. Next week we'll focus in on some more clear and present dangers that we're faced with. You might have noticed it's been a stormy spring–and you might have heard Trump's gutting of various agencies has impacted forecasting.
The bottom line is, even if we're lucky enough that the seas don't rise and the plains don't burn in our lifetimes, we're still going to be dealing with a world that is becoming increasingly hostile to life. Hope's not lost, though. It's still worthwhile to push back at every opportunity, and to learn how to survive, thrive, and help others.