Climate Tragedy

[mdlbear]

Tragedy:

A drama or literary work in which the main character is brought to ruin or suffers extreme sorrow, especially as a consequence of a tragic flaw, moral weakness, or inability to cope with unfavorable circumstances.

-- definition of tragedy by The Free Dictionary (emphasis mine)

I'm really not sure where to put the cut tag on this post. Today I'm talking about Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy [PDF], by Professor Jem Bendell. The author has a link to resources on emotional support in the sidebar of his home page. As I said back on Sunday, it's a pulling-no-punches prediction of the likely consequences of global warming.

Links and some commentary have been seen elsewhere on my DW reading list (fayanora, siliconshaman, ysabetwordsmith). ysabetwordsmith points out that Very little of this is actually new; what's new is that some people are actually listening this time.

It's pretty clear that the paper is an attempt to shock enough people into listening to make a difference. Um... is this the right place to mention that this is The Climate Change Paper So Depressing It's Sending People to Therapy? Probably.

Okay, I think that's enough of a warning. Please consider your headspace before proceeding, and maybe find a cat or a stuffie to hold, because it's that bad.

If you haven't already read it, go read the paper[PDF]. Also, perhaps, The study on collapse they thought you should not read – yet. I'll wait.

The paper points out that the climate has already changed. There are already killer heat waves and droughts, unstable governments, refugees, extinction of sensitive species. And even if we reduce C02 emissions to zero, it may already be too late to stop warming because of feedback loops.

See, here's the thing about positive feedback loops -- they're exponential. Once a system gets to the tipping point (where an increase in some parameter -- temperature for example -- sets off a process that causes a further increase), the rate of change increases rapidly. A well-known example is compound interest, where the more money you have, the faster you gain money.

Climate change has plenty of feedback loops to go around. One is the arctic ice cap. Ice reflects more sunlight than water, so as the ice melts the water gets warmer, which melts more ice... But that's not the only one.

The feedback loop we really have to worry about is the one involving methane hydrates, which are found under cold water and in permafrost. Methane is a much (25 times) more effective greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. At little above freezing, methane hydrates start melting back into liquid water and methane. As methane increases in the atmosphere, the temperature goes up, which melts more methane hydrates, which... You get the picture. There is some debate about how much methane is there, and how quickly it's melting. But see above about the ice cap.

(You can also have negative feedback loops, which are stable. For example, carbon dioxide encourages plant growth, which decreases carbon dioxide. The real question is whether the negative feedback loops are enough to balance the positive ones. It doesn't look good - atmospheric CO2 and methane are both increasing. So is the rate of increase.)

Some quotes from the paper:

With an increase of carbon emissions of 2% in 2017,the decoupling of economic activity from emissions is not yet making a net dent in global emissions (Canadell et al, 2017). So, we are not on the path to prevent going over 2 degrees warming through emissions reductions. In any case the IPCC estimate of a carbon budget was controversial with many scientists who estimated that existing CO2 in the atmosphere should already produce global ambient temperature rises over 5°C and so there is no carbon budget – it has already been overspent (Wasdell, 2015)...(p. 9)

The authors of the 2016 Global Methane Budget report found that in the early years of this century, concentrations of methane rose by only about 0.5ppb each year, compared with 10ppb in 2014 and 2015. Various sources were identified, from fossil fuels - to agriculture to melting permafrost (Saunois et al, 2016)... (p. 11)

We do not know for certain how disruptive the impacts of climate change will be or where will be most affected, especially as economic and social systems will respond in complex ways. But the evidence is mounting that the impacts will be catastrophic to our livelihoods and the societies that we live within. Our norms of behaviour, that we call our “civilisation,” may also degrade. When we contemplate this possibility, it can seem abstract. The words I ended the previous paragraph with may seem, subconsciously at least, to be describing a situation to feel sorry about as we witness scenes on TV or online. But when I say starvation, destruction, migration, disease and war, I mean in your own life. With the power down, soon you wouldn’t have water coming out of your tap. You will depend on your neighbours for food and some warmth. You will become malnourished. You won’t know whether to stay or go. You will fear being violently killed before starving to death. (p. 13)

Different people speak of a scenario being possible, probable or inevitable. In my conversations with both professionals in sustainability or climate, and others not directly involved, I have found that people choose a scenario and a probability depending not on what the data and its analysis might suggest, but what they are choosing to live with as a story about this topic. That parallels findings in psychology that none of us are purely logic machines but relate information into stories about how things relate and why (Marshall, 2014). None of us are immune to that process. Currently, I have chosen to interpret the information as indicating inevitable collapse, probable catastrophe and possible extinction. (p. 19)

But we definitely know that continuing to work in the ways we have done until now is not just backfiring – it is holding the gun to our own heads. With this in mind, we can choose to explore how to evolve what we do, without any simple answers. In my post-denial state, shared by increasing numbers of my students and colleagues, I realised that we would benefit from conceptual maps for how to address these questions. I therefore set about synthesising the main things people talked about doing differently in light of a view of inevitable collapse and probable catastrophe. That is what I offer now as the “deep adaptation agenda.” (p. 21)

Recent research suggests that human societies will experience disruptions to their basic functioning within less than ten years due to climate stress. Such disruptions include increased levels of malnutrition, starvation, disease, civil conflict and war – and will not avoid affluent nations. (p.26 -- this is part of the conclusions.)

There's some support from this study, Deadly heatwaves could affect 74 percent of the world’s population (The paper is under a paywall, but the abstract is free.) The maps are frightening. That 74% figure is for 2100 if emissions continue to rise at their current rate. With "aggressive" reduction (and I don't know whether that means to zero emissions -- I doubt it) it's 48%. And see above about feedback. And don't forget Bitcoin!

The same group points out that Greenhouse gas [is] triggering more changes than we can handle because it's more than just heat waves -- there are other changes going on that are usually studied separately rather than together.

Scared yet? I don't know -- nobody knows, really -- whether Bendell's most extreme predictions are true, nor what the timescale will really turn out to be. The bottom line, though, is things are worse than most people think, and getting worse faster than anticipated in the studies that led to the 2-degree rise by 2100 target.

I don't profess to understand much of the "Deep Adaptation" section of the paper. It gets into politics, sociology, and psychology, none of which are my strong points. But the main point is that we need to make drastic changes at a societal level, based on the certainty that things will get worse, and the high probability that they will get much worse. We might be able to save civilization, if we can stop making things worse and adapt quickly enough to the changes we can't stop.

If we can't, well, at least the tardigrades will probably make it through. I'm not so sure about the cockroaches.

Comments

Well ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

>>Scared yet? I don't know -- nobody knows, really -- whether Bendell's most extreme predictions are true, nor what the timescale will really turn out to be. The bottom line, though, is things are worse than most people think, and getting worse faster than anticipated in the studies that led to the 2-degree rise by 2100 target.<<

I should point out that scientists are all the time finding new things they didn't factor in to those predictions. The vast majority of these are things that make it even worse. Only a few are ameliorating factors. Since they're still finding out things that make it worse, then logically, the situation is quite a lot worse that people know when you raise the estimates to compensate for all the shit we don't know yet.

[moem]

Of course I'm scared. If you're not scared, you're not paying attention.

[tagryn]

I'm instinctively dubious of scientific papers that fail the peer review process, but whose authors choose to publish themselves without first revising after receiving the feedback they were given. There's good reasons why science has that process in place, despite its limitations. We're also only seeing the reasons for rejection that the author chose to select to address.

I think the paper will appeal to those already holding an Ehrlichian perspective, and that's why its gone viral, but I would have liked to have seen the author actually do the additional work to get it in good enough shape to make it through the scientific vetting process.

[mdlbear]

Point. Presumably he could have put the actual science (which I think is just a meta-analysis) in a scientific paper and the rest in an editorial or blog post. Which is effectively what he's done; this thing reads more like an opinion piece than a scientific paper.