Climate Change Daydreams

The trouble with Mr. Easterbrook is the trouble with most people: trying to fit radically changed circumstances into the same old world view. Consider landing on someplace like Jupiter's moon Io and trying to see it in Earthly terms. What do we make of sulfurous volcanoes that regularly erupt stuff into near-moon ballistic arcs? How about the deadly level of radiation near Io? And, what of the slippery, rapidly oozing surface; quicksulfur ready to absorb the unwary?

Mr. Easterbrook and many others apparently cannot shake off their Earthly shackles to comprehend what global climate change portends. I doubt very much he attended the February AAAS annual meeting in San Francisco. I doubt very much that any of the political class left the comfort of their Washington aeries to gather the flowering data, charts and graphs bursting out of those West Coast conference rooms. This is especially neglectful, since AAAS has it headquarters in Gucci Gulch, not so far from places like the Brookings Institute. But, if any of those Washington creatures attended the scientist's convention about sustainability, they have little to show for it.

The same thing happened with Einstein's Relativity. Although substantially verified in 1919, people simply could not grasp its implications. During my childhood after Word War II, I recall adults having conversations about Relativity. I had no idea what they were talking about, but I could see their horror, their upset, quizzical looks. Relativity bothered them in some way related to their religious beliefs, because Relativity came up when they talked about their religion. That adult incomprehension was one of the things that interested me in Relativity at an early age. Retrospectively, I can see those people were confronted with an insuperable challenge: the theft and bursting of their Newtonian clockworks, which undermined feelings of security and comfort. I suppose it is even worse now, with the acceptance and use of Quantum Mechanics, for those who imagine the world as fixed and orderly.

In his article, Easterbrook declares "The market has caused the greenhouse-gas problem, and the market is the best hope of solving it." He opposes the government spending any money on greenhouse-gas research: "... Progress would be faster if the federal government spent nothing at all on greenhouse-gas-reduction  research - but enacted regulations that gave the private sector a significant profit motive to find solutions that work in actual use, as opposed to on paper  in government studies." In this, he merely repeats the propaganda of the oil & gas industries, and the ultra-conservatives who have until recently pooh-poohed the notion of climate change altogether.

What the go-slow, market-oriented people fail to realize is the problem is systemic. Easterbrook's article is filled with hidden assumptions; e.g., the belief that technical fixes are waiting to be found by greedy entrepreneurs. Another scarcely hidden assumption is that coal and oil will continue to be exploited by the leading powers, despite monumental damages due to climate change. Then, he optimistically assumes medical science can and will find cures to the deadly diseases that move into the First World, and that crops will be genetically engineered to grow in a changed environment.

Thanks to Walt Disney, a single word comes to mind that describes the foregoing: goofy. That's right, goofy.

One of the things people cannot do in the face of horrific climate changes is burn more coal, oil and gas. Whatever the disastrous economic consequences of shutting down the fossil fuel economy, continuing those uses will bring on more fearsome results. Almost literally, we have a choice between the frying pan and the fire.

Easterbrook mentions little things like the water shortage. This is not humanly fixable by any foreseeable technology. Climate change will desertify the great North American breadbasket. It is already melting off the Himalayan ice pack, which is not just the source of the Ganges, but ultimately also the source of the Yangtze and Yellow rivers. The water, thus the food and drink, required by nearly two-thirds the world's population will mostly dry up. If you are Chinese or Indian or North American, how are you planning to survive this? No, there won't be any bottled water at the store.

Markets are singularly unprepared and unequipped in principle to deal with this sort of crisis. Consider the December, 2005 tsunami which killed thousands of people and destroyed a remote playground of the rich and famous. Market economies are rebuilding the resorts, because the very same wealthy people and other jet setters are returning there. But the market hasn't helped the vast majority of those survivors whose lives were ruined by the tsunami. Those unfortunates have had to rely on goodwill and the concerted action of the United Nations for relief. The Indonesian government is simply too poor to help them much (which is one of the reasons there was a guerilla war in that region). Look at the plight of New Orleans, a large city in a rich, First World country. What happens when there's the equivalent of a tsunami everywhere?

Easterbrook minimizes the possible glaciation of Europe due to stoppage of the Gulf Stream. Is the end of Europe some sort of ghastly joke? What are we to do with some 200-300 million people forever evicted from their homes, their countries and their history? This is a problem at least ten times larger than World War II.

Global climate change is not a problem solved by a few snide remarks. We really don't need the advice of the fossil fuel industries. Capitalism and Conservatives will never solve this problem, if only because the economic, political and social elites cannot see beyond saving their own hides. Just how many people can Alaska support?

A problem of this magnitude has only been inflicted on Gaia's biology a few times during the last 500 million years. The asteroid impact at the KT boundary (65 MYA) was at least the last straw for the dinosaurs. There is little doubt that impact produced a global firestorm, followed by a winter that lasted several years or decades. Around 85% of all living things on land, and a lesser fraction in the seas, were wiped out. The Permian extinction, 225 MYA, destroyed more than 95% of all living things on land and in the seas. The last few climate cycles may be responsible for at least one, and maybe two, near extinction events during the last 250,000 years which decimated our ancestors and probably gave rise to us, the latest evolution of H. sapiens. All those now living are descendants of a few thousand people living in West Africa, who somehow survived the last extinction event about 70,000 years ago.

(Please remember Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry who challenged his quarry to remember how many bullets were shot in the chase. Was his long barreled Magnum empty? The man replied, "I's gots to know." Are you feeling lucky today? For a millennium?)

We are faced with a great problem that will take national and, sooner or later, co-operative international efforts to remediate. This is not a problem amenable to anything other than central direction and control, based on  the best available science. Whether the human race can actually combine to effect rational solutions to a planet-wide problem is not only a test of our intelligence, but also our worthiness to continue its existence. This is a Darwinian test of the first order.