Welcome to Episode 7 of Warming World Explained. I’m Beth Stoeckly, your host. It has been a while since the last episode came out and I would like to talk about what scientists are saying about the state of the climate now. But first, I would like to start with a story.
When I first came to California, I was terrified of rattlesnakes. I grew up in upstate New York, where there were no poisonous snakes. Also no large predators and even the bears were relatively small and timid.
So when one of the professors at UCSB was talking about hiking at a department social hour, I asked him about rattlesnakes. He told me the basics of coexisting with rattlesnakes, most importantly never putting any part of your body anywhere you cannot see. Then he said, “You just have to get over the illusion that nature is kind.”
“You just have to get over the illusion that nature is kind.”
I have thought about that many times over the years, but never more often than in recent years, as we have watched one weather disaster after another, and often several at once.
In December of 2017, a fire started on the west edge of Ventura, California, some 20 miles from where I live. It came to be known as the Thomas fire and it spent the next month burning its way almost to Santa Barbara, another 30 miles or so up the coast. At the time, it was the largest burn area of a wildfire in California since they started keeping records in 1932. Four years later, it was number 8.
Yes, folks, you got that right. The Thomas fire was the largest fire in California in 85 years of recording fires. In the next 4 years, we had seven larger, including a couple more than 3 times as large. And of course, it isn’t just California or even the western US that has seen massive blazes. Canada, Australia, Siberia, the amazon. There have been massive wildfires in places that didn’t used to burn. And at the same time, we have seen extensive flooding on several continents at once.
People are noticing. People are paying attention. Fewer and fewer people are looking at weather disasters and saying it’s just the normal variability of weather.
The most thorough and comprehensive compilation of what is known about the state of the earth’s climate comes from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC for short. This is a UN sponsored organization tasked with monitoring and reporting on all scientific literature relevant to climate change, its causes, potential impacts, and mitigation options. The IPCC puts out special reports on many topics, and periodic comprehensive assessment reports.
In the summer of 2021 they published the first section of their 6th assessment report which covered the physical science basis. When it was published, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Guterres, called it “Code Red for Planet Earth”. The Cliff Notes version, as reported by newspapers is this: There is no longer any doubt that the planet is warming. There is very little doubt that the burning of fossil fuels, increasing the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, is a major cause.
The second and third parts which address impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation were published in the spring of 2022. The fourth and final part is now expected to be published in March of 2023.
Each part of the assessment report has a page-long list of contributors; scientists from all over the world. And the 3 parts already published add up to about 8,000 pages. As I mentioned, Comprehensive. And all leading to the conclusion, “the window of opportunity is closing to secure a livable and sustainable future for all.”
We have to get over the illusion that nature is kind.
It seems as if climate change is in the news every day. If there aren’t wildfires or massive floods today, no arctic weather in Texas or people dying of the heat in Oregon, then the news media fill the space with reports of studies. One day it’s a report that currents in the Atlantic ocean are slowing. Another day, we read that the amazon rainforest is approaching a tipping point and much of it could become savannah. And recently, I read a report of a study that found that all this doomsday news is making people depressed. Duh!
Perhaps you are one of the legions of people who have watched the weather disasters in recent years and concluded that “somebody should do something!” But alas, who should do what is still very controversial.
In upcoming episodes, I would like to discuss the science of some of the proposed actions in more detail. Right now, I would like to point out that there is no magic bullet. No single action can fix everything. And every proposal has its downside as well as its benefits.
That sounds simple and maybe even obvious. But it is easy to dismiss proposals too fast. 15 or 20 years ago, lots of people were saying that solar energy and wind energy could never be used for large scale generation of electricity because they are not always available. By 2020, solar energy accounted for 3% of all the electricity generated in the United States, and it is projected to be 20% by 2050.
People who didn’t stop at the first objection figured out that there are two ways around the problem that solar energy is only available in daytime: use solar in the daytime and another method at night, or develop ways to store large amounts of energy.
I’m using solar energy here as an example to show that apparent objections can often be overcome if we don’t dismiss an idea too quickly.
We may also decide that we need to look again at some ideas we have already dismissed. For instance, many of us have developed a knee-jerk ,just-say-no reaction to the words “nuclear power”. But now many scientists and engineers are saying that if we want to reduce carbon emissions rapidly the only way to do it and maintain our level of power use is with nuclear power. They view it as a zero carbon power source to use during the transition, while we are developing enough renewable sources. In a future episode I hope to look at the arguments and the safety record and the improvements that have been made in nuclear reactors in recent years. We may have had valid reasons for opposing nuclear power plants, but circumstances have changed. If we believe that greenhouse gases are contributing to climate change, then not to reduce emissions as quickly as possible will also have bad consequences. As in many situations, not making a decision is a decision, and it also has consequences.
We have to get over the illusion that nature is kind.
Not all the news is bad. There are many people and companies improving ways to generate clean energy, to store energy, to power machinery efficiently without fossil fuels. They realize that there are profits to be made from the solutions to these problems.
And the biggest dose of good news: recently the US Department of Energy announced a breakthrough in the development of fusion power. One of the groups working on the problem has succeeded in getting more energy out than it had to put in to cause the reaction. In a future episode I will talk about why fusion power is called the “holy grail” of cheap, available, clean energy, why it has taken over sixty years to get this far, and why it still may take years or decades to make it commercially available.
Before I go, may I remind you that scientist’s basic understanding of the greenhouse effect is not new, not controversial and does not depend on computer modeling. If we keep pouring greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the average temperature of the earth will go up. The detailed predictions about how the extra energy will be distributed, what weather changes will occur where, those do come from modeling and the models don’t all agree.
And, as the IPCC is telling us, if we wait for certainty that disaster is imminent, it may be too late.
When I was teaching, I used to ask my students how many of them had come to school that day by car. Most raised their hands. Then I asked how many had worn their seat belt. The same hands went up. I asked, “Why? The chance of getting into a crash just coming to school is very small.” Of course a few said that they wore seat belts so they wouldn’t get ticketed. But the majority wanted to survive a crash if they did get into one. The point is that when the downside is totally unacceptable, we take action to prevent it, even if it is improbable. And we are being told by a world-wide consensus of climate scientists that if we continue to emit large amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, environmental disaster on a global scale is highly probable, even if we aren’t sure about exactly when.
We have to get over the illusion that nature is kind.
In future episodes I hope to discuss various options, the science behind them, the arguments for and against their use, including options to adapt to the situation we find ourselves in. Until next time, good night for Warming World Explained.
