A few weeks ago, I repeated the drive of seventy miles along the north-south path of Hurricane Helene that I made two weeks after the storm . In the few wealthier sectors along this highway, downed trees have been removed and sawn for lumber (at a large loss) or chipped. I have heard hardwood and pine mulch is virtually free for the taking along the 200 miles from Valdosta to Augusta in Georgia. All you need is a stout truck and a way to load it. Other areas remain a complete mess.
I also saw many new roofs on the journey but just as many old roofs still covered “temporarily” with blue tarps from WalMart. Battered work trucks have been abandoned, a few still upside down or deep in the ditch. Several country church steeples were still on the ground or missing altogether, including that of the very large First Baptist Church in one of the remaining relatively prosperous small cities on the route. Further north, friends in Western North Carolina send recent photographs of utter devastation that shows few signs of recovery. Perhaps a hard lesson that there is no escape from the effects of climate change?
This brings up the question: Whither the climate? This is not to say that Helene was solely due to a planet Earth that is warming because of human action, or perhaps it is more correct to say inaction, over the past forty years, But it has become clear to all but the Merchants of Doubt that polymath Charles Babbage was correct when he wrote in On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (1835):
The chemical changes which thus take place (in the early Industrial Revolution) are constantly increasing the atmosphere by large quantities of carbonic acid [i.e., carbon dioxide] and other gases noxious to animal life. The means by which nature decomposes these elements, or reconverts them into solid form, are not sufficiently known. (quoted from Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital, p. 1)
Our responses [1], active and passive, to a warming world have been interesting. Several recent books on the subject illustrate where we are and where we might be going. They include:
- The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, David Wallace-Wells, 2019.
- Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility, Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Young Lutunatabua, editors, 2023.
- What If We Get It Right? Visions of Climate Futures, Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, 2024.
- Our Fragile Moment: How Lessons from Earth’s Past Can Help us Survive the Climate Crisis, Michael Mann, 2023.
- Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown, Andreas Malm and Wim Carton, 2024.
I began reading The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming when it was released in 2019 but soon put it aside for other projects, and also because it is grim. I finished it in November 2023. It was well worth the few evenings sitting in my favorite chair. The key to The Uninhabitable Earth is the subtitle: Life After Warming. Global warming is a given here, and Wallace-Wells is certainly correct in his assessment, but the book is not about the science of anthropogenic global warming (AGW), “Rather it is about what warming means to the way we live on this planet.” What will the new world be? How will humans adapt? What will become of the natural world, of which we are a part? Or:
Climate change is fast, must faster than it seems we have the capacity to recognize and acknowledge; but it is also long, almost longer than we can truly imagine.
This latter is true of everything that must be reckoned in the deep time of hundreds of thousands to hundreds of millions of years. It is worth remembering that humans and chimpanzees had a common ancestor about 5 million years ago and that the species Homo sapiens emerged only a few hundred thousand years ago. Recorded history goes back only about 10,000 years to the advent of agriculture. The magnificent archaeological site Göbekli Tepe has been dated to ~11,500 years before the present and our understanding of it is not yet even rudimentary. The appreciation of deep time is an impossibly rare human sensibility.
For example, if we have locked in an average of only 2°C temperature increase by 2100, the last time the atmosphere contained the concomitant 500 ppm carbon dioxide:
Sixteen million years ago, the planet was not two degrees warmer; it was somewhere between five and eight, giving the planet about 130 feet of sea-level rise, enough to draw a new American coastline as far west as I-95 (actually much farther west in the Southeast, where all but a few hills of Florida will be underwater). Some of these processes take thousands of years, but they are also irreversible, and therefore effectively permanent (on anything approaching a human time scale). You might hope to simply reverse climate change; you can’t. It will outrun all of us.
A problem with climate change is that it is too slow see while being too large to understand. Timothy Morton’s concept of hyperobject is relevant here:
A conceptual fact so large and complex that…it can never be properly comprehended. There are many features of climate change – its size, its scope, its brutality – that, alone satisfy this definition; together they might elevate it into a higher and more incomprehensible conceptual category yet. But time is perhaps the most mind-bending feature, the worst outcomes arriving so long from now that we may reflexively discount their reality.
Indeed. The practice of conventional neoclassical/neoliberal economics rather than political economy requires that the future be discounted, often into insignificance. In this lies the futility of using any conventional economic argument to explain, or explain away, responses to climate change. This is not new. That we are inclined to discount the future, and the “other,” is the recurring theme in the work of Herman Daly and Wendell Berry. They may be listened to one of these days, when it is too late. For those who want to an unvarnished account of “life after warming,” The Uninhabitable Earth has held up well. David Wallace-Wells is currently writing for The New York Times and still worth the read, whether you agree with him or not.
The three middle books discussed here can be summed up in the subtitle of Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility. Rebecca Solnit edited the book and also contributed to six of its chapters, beginning with “Difficult is Not the Same as Impossible.” Here she states the theme of Not Too Late:
Hope is not optimism. Optimism assumes the best, and assumes its inevitability, which leads to passivity, as do the pessimism and cynicism that assume the worst. Hope, like love, means taking risks and being vulnerable to the effects of loss. It means recognizing the uncertainty of the future and making a commitment to try to participate in shaping it. It means facing difficulties and accepting uncertainty. To hope is to recognize that you can protect some of what you love even while grieving what you cannot – and know that we must act without knowing the outcome of those actions.
She also gave us a near perfect description of Neoliberalism (the market is the measure of all things, even those that cannot be measured):
Frameworks matter, too, and too many of them are traps. Capitalism encourages us to imagine ourselves as consumers rather than citizens; authorities like us to believe we have no power. These perspectives leave us with few options but to modulate our consumption – to change nothing but ourselves and merely implore the powerful to heed our wishes. They privatize our public spirits. We need to remember our own heroic nature, our capacity for courage, compassion, and action, to remember those who came before us and took action against the odds and sometimes won.
But what can people do? “Shared Solutions Are our Greatest Hope and Strength” shows that shared solutions will be, by definition, local solutions. These include solar panels on a very large warehouse at Brooklyn Army Terminal that provide the local community with cleaner energy without the need to install solar panels on their houses throughout the neighborhood. Urban gardens that approach the productivity of small, diversified farms (which are more productive and ecologically beneficial than large industrial farms that produce ‘commodity’ crops) are another example of as many as can be imagined.
Terry Tempest Williams has a large part in “Meeting the More and the Marrow.” Williams’s portrait is in the Robert Shetterly collection Americans Who Tell the Truth, in which she is quoted, “The eyes of the future are looking back at us and they are praying for us to see beyond our own time.” In Not Too Late she says:
I used to think bearing witness was a passive act. I don’t believe that anymore. I think that when we are present – when we bear witness, when we do not avert our gaze – something is revealed – the very marrow of life. We change. A transformation occurs. Our consciousness shifts.”
We could do with more bearing witness across our entire world. It is clear that much of what we have done to change our climate trajectory has been only performative, as we continue to release carbon in a hundred years, i.e., real time that can be measured in human lifetimes of our grandparents and great grandparents, that was sequestered over more than a hundred million years of deep time that is incomprehensible. This allows us to avert our gaze, for now, but not past the foreseeable future if we are willing to look at the present in a few sentinel places (see the photographs).
In “Different Ways of Measuring: On Renunciation and Abundance” Solnit notes that our false Age of Affluence has rendered society incapable of imagining anything other than what we have. [2] We quantify everything, much of it disposable junk, cheap furniture, plastic that collects in an immense gyre in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. But this is not wealth, and it is certainly not affluence. Instead, we live in an age that is poor in so many ways, an age filled with:
Loneliness and disconnection, from love, friendship, community, from the natural world, from moral and physical beauty, so much hopelessness, so many who don’t have enough in a world full of people who have too much. What if that is what we need to renounce? What if the climate crisis requires renouncing not this version of wealth but its underlying poverty? Overconsumption requires sweatshops in the Global South, extraction of resources in ways that devastate local communities…What if we measured our wealth in other ways, as confidence in the future, as the clarity of the air and its breathability, as in pride in one’s community and country, as integrity in our material and moral lives…as friendship and the sense of safety that means help is there when needed, as honor and dignity and a meaningful life.
Not Too Late is discursive and does preach a bit, mostly to a choir that is much larger than supposed. But it is not particularly preachy. What If We Get It Right: Visions of Climate Futures is almost upbeat and commendable for that. Hope, not optimism, also permeates this book, which was bought in an indispensable independent bookstore about three miles as the pelican flies from the sentinel place mentioned above. The overarching message throughout What If We Get It Right is that climate change is not a scientific or technical problem, although technical solutions will figure in any effective responses. [3] Climate change is a human problem with a human solution, as described here in this excerpt of “A Vision” by Wendell Berry (p. 48). Full text here from the highly recommended film Look & See:
If we will have the wisdom to survive,
to stand still like slow-growing trees
on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it,
if we will make our seasons welcome here,
asking not too much of earth or heaven,
then a long time after we are dead
the lives our lives prepare will live
here, their houses strongly placed
upon the valley sides, fields and gardens
rich in the windows. The River will run
clear, as we will never know it,
and over it, birdsong like a canopy.
…
This is no paradisal dream.
Its hardship is its possibility.
Our Fragile Moment: How Lessons from Earth’s Past Can Help us Survive Climate Crisis is one climate scientist’s qualified brief for hope. Michael Mann, author of the hockey stick graph that has been confirmed several times over – contrary to the Merchants of Doubt, explains how and why we live on what has been, and still is for a long time, a Goldilocks planet that is “just right” for plants, animals, and microbes as we know them.
Mann convinced me he was on the right track when he referred to Lynn Margulis as one scientist with two great theories to her name. Margulis was a cell biologist before they were known as such, and by using data from many different sources formalized the endosymbiont theory for the origin of eukaryotic cells, i.e., that mitochondria and chloroplasts were originally bacteria that took up symbiotic residence in an early cell with a nucleus. To simplify the theory, one lineage led to plants and the other to animals. Margulis’s work was controversial from the very beginning. It is now a large foundation block of modern biology and Margulis was eventually elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences. [4]
Along with James Lovelock Margulis later developed the Gaia Hypothesis, which in Mann’s description:
Posits that the Earth system – including life itself – regulates conditions on Earth in a way that keeps the planet in habitable bounds, a sort of thermostat. There are mechanisms that are fundamental to the way our climate system operates…that make Earth’s climate system resilient, at least to a point.
Gaia was as controversial as the Endosymbiotic Theory and viewed by the unimaginative among the scientific community, who are more numerous than one would expect, as attributing intentionality to the Earth system while anthropomorphizing the planet using an Earth goddess name. But Gaia simply proposed that processes operating through the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology generally oppose forces that push the system away from an equilibrium state that supports the ecosphere in the air and water and on land. This makes perfect sense, while also pointing out that the equilibrium can be destabilized. For example, in the words of Mann, releasing carbon that was sequestered over a hundred million years in little over a hundred years is likely to be destabilizing. Life will survive, just as it has since its origin over two billion years ago. But current life as we know it – plant, animal, microbe – has no guarantees.
For a general overview of the science of climate change, Our Fragile Moment covers the topic very well, including one of my favorites: Nonlinear effects and how they are difficult to understand and predict. We live in a nonlinear world that we experience linearly on shortened timelines. For example, Antarctic ice sheet collapse can be accelerated as glaciers calve into the ocean, leaving behind ice cliffs that are too tall to support themselves. They will subsequently collapse spontaneously leading to further increases in sea level. A predicted increase in sea level of three feet that becomes six to nine feet on the same timescale will be difficult to manage, especially in our full Earth.
A final implicit message of Our Fragile Moment is that logical and temporal prediction are two entirely different things the Merchants of Doubt use very well as a weapon. Temporal prediction requires a closed dataset. If all the microstates of the system can be known, it is possible to predict when something will happen. With climate, in which all microstates can never be known, temporal predictions are fraught and will remain so. But this does not prevent logical prediction of the effects of AGW. As pointed out by David Wallace-Wells, the last time carbon dioxide levels were as high as they are now, sea level was more than 100 feet higher than today. That could be true, today, plus 200,000 years, which is a very small interval (~0.004% of the total) in the 4.5-billion-year history of the Earth. It is also worth remembering that virtually all climate models have been conservative in their projections. The situation is likely more serious than assumed.
This brings us to Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown. Overshoot describes how international politics has rendered discussion and argument about climate change moot. If The Uninhabitable Earth is grim as I described it above, Overshoot is grim and dark. But it is refreshing in that it calls out our so-called leaders, politicians and economists alike, in their fecklessness. But, of course, we are the ones who send them to COP every year (up to COP 30 in 2025), where they do nothing much. Based on current politics nothing much will become simply nothing very soon. Overshoot is:
A history of what we shall call the overshoot conjecture, or the period when officially declared limits to global warming are exceeded – or in the process of being so – and the dominant classes responsible for the excess throw up their hands in resignation and accept that intolerable heat is coming. This acceptance can be tacit or explicit…often couched in the idea of a promised return to safer levels: we can let warming pass 1.5°C or 2°C and then, at a later date, reverse it and turn the temperatures down to where they should be…Overshoot is here not a fate passively acquiesced to. It is an actively championed programme for how to deal with the rush into catastrophe: let it continue for the time being, and then we shall sort things out at the end of the century.
Well, there is no thermostat to be turned down like the one in the hallway outside of the room in which I am writing this. The consequences of a 2°C increase in global average temperature cannot be reversed on a human timescale. Climate does not work that way. Overshoot is very good at calling out the specious reasoning of economists on the costs of climate change, beginning with William Nordhaus, who was awarded The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel “for integrating climate change into long-run macroeconomic analysis.” According to Overshoot:
To minimize the ‘greenhouse damage function’, Nordhaus employed some highly fanciful arguments: because humans currently thrive in all sorts of climes, from Arabia to Alaska, climatic variables have negligible effects on productivity (as if future warming would not throw every region off-kilter). And because most economic activity takes place indoors – think cardiovascular surgery or microprocessor fabrication in “clean rooms” – most output is insulated from the climate and won’t be ruffled by the temperatures; more precisely, 87% of it (as if what goes on indoors happens on another planet, the cardiovascular surgeons living not off food and water but enclosed air). [Parentheses in original]
Another prominent climate economist…Richard Tol, took this line of reasoning to new heights when pressed on the question of whether ten degrees of warming might take a toll on the economy (said): “We’d move inside, much like the Saudis have.”
Or maybe not. Last I read, the Saudi dreamscape known as Neom had run into severe constraints, financial and physical, affecting its execution. This discussion reminds me of the economist who, in a panel discussion described by Herman Daly more than forty years ago, declared that because agriculture accounted for a relative few percentage points of GDP at that time, it was not a big concern in the macroeconomy. Naturally, a non-economist in the back of the room asked, “What does he think we will eat?”
Defensive responses to the reality of climate change typify the following tropes of a fundamentally Liberal (capital “L”) economics that believes in Homo economicus:
- Rationalism – Human agents behave rationally.
- Economism – Mitigation is a matter of cost.
- Presentism – Current generations should be spared the onus.
- Conservatism – Incumbent capital must be saved from loses.
- Gradualism – Any changes will have to be incremental.
- Optimism – We live in the best of all possible economies.
The second instalment of this project by Malm and Carton will be called The Long Heat: Climate Politics When It’s Too Late. This book will be a treatment of adaptation to climate change, sequestration of the carbon overload, and geoengineering, which may be the one and only option within the living memory of the next few generations. I look forward to it, because adaptation will be first on the list of responses, in the hope that geoengineering remains a fever dream of technologists.
In the meantime, the one key lesson of these five books is that whatever happens on the Earth, our world will get smaller in the multiple cascading crises likely to come in a warming world. These include agricultural disruption and mass migration due to heat and inundation. Local and regional economies will be the essential in this new world. We can do this well, despite the changes, and produce a more livable, humane world or the world of Mad Max. Earth is our only planetary home, now and forever more, contrary to certain techno-fantasists (or is it fetishists). The choice is ours, but it is coming.
And to those who do not view climate change as a problem to be addressed, much less adapted to, what do we have to lose by transitioning to a renewable energy economy that runs as much as possible on the current energy produced by the sun? If we do this, the oil, coal, and natural gas will only last that much longer, while providing time to become completely carbon neutral and ensure a stable climate, to the extent we can, in perpetuity. Win, win.
Notes
[1] Rebecca Solnit rightly notes in Not Too Late that “not everyone is part of any version of ‘we.’” When using ‘our’ and ‘we’ in this essay, I mean all of us. Today ‘we’ are on every side of what should be considered an existential argument about the fate of the Earth as an ecosphere compatible with life as we have come to know it in all its glory, and much too often otherwise when it comes to humans.
[2] The late Mark Fisher (and others): “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”
[3] The problems are likely to begin for our children and grandchildren when there are only technical solutions such as any number of harebrained geoengineering experiments that must work the first time, with no untoward consequences. Only the scientistic fool thinks this is a good idea.
[4] Election to the National Academy of Sciences is something that never happened with her first husband, Carl Sagan, whose work on planetary astronomy surely deserved the recognition. But Sagan was too literate and too public for his strictly academic colleagues who thought Cosmos was too ‘popular’ to be real science. No matter that it was based on his earned authority as an astronomer. He also was a frequent and entertaining guest on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. Another scientific no-no to the stuffed shirts of science of my acquaintance.