Reversing the Curve
There is no economic metric that can completely describe the current scale of change
Consider this: In 2022 Texas saw the average daily maximum statewide top 100 degrees F for the entire month of July. In the coming decades, parts of the South will see 100 degrees for 70 or more consecutive days. Those will be the average years, not the heat wave ones. As Scientific American put it: “This Hot Summer Is One of the Coolest of the Rest of Our Lives.
Lahore, Pakistan, and India’s Delhi are among the most polluted cities in the world. When Pakistan was created in 1947, 33 percent of its total area was covered by forests; now that area is only 5 percent. A 2022 United Nations report estimated that Pakistan’s annual economic loss to climate change will soon be $26 billion, or 9.1 percent of its gross domestic product.
Sufficient expenditure could solve many of these problems at a stroke — but Pakistan is struggling to run up a descending escalator, with energy import dependence, weak agricultural productivity, and lack of external investment contributing to a vicious cycle of underdevelopment.
It took only a few months to become obvious to everyone how low those estimates were. As monsoon rains coupled with 120-degree heat stretched on week after week, month after month, some 50 million people became displaced. Eagles fell dead from the sky, landing on houses, monuments, shops. Then came the rain. A million houses washed away, some carried off by new rivers that had never existed before. Due to extreme saturation, water is likely to cover fields for months and large regions may be unfarmable for up to 2 years. The humanitarian crisis is just beginning. There is no economic metric that can completely describe that scale of suffering.
Sherry Rehman, Pakistan’s climate change minister, called the flooding a “climate-induced humanitarian disaster” of “epic proportions.”
We are at the moment at the ground zero of the front line of extreme weather events, in an unrelenting cascade of heatwaves, forest fires, flash floods, multiple glacial lake outbursts, flood events and now the monster monsoon of the decade is wreaking non-stop havoc throughout the country.
Bill McKibben wrote: “And there’s no doubt that the people of Pakistan are not to blame for their tragedy: on average each Pakistani is responsible for about one fifteenth as much carbon dioxide as each American….
I beg to differ. At UN climate meetings, Sherry Rehman is just the latest spokesperson for Pakistan’s God-given right to attain the affluence of Sweden before agreeing to strong climate measures. That is why Pakistan is building eight more large coal-fired power stations, four of them in Sindh Province where rainfall is now five times the past century’s average. Those coal plants are 20% more expensive to build and operate than solar photovoltaic farms. In a land where air conditioning is the only way to survive catastrophic temperatures, Pakistan’s rate of coal consumption has a doubling rate of two years. In spite of this, Sherry Rehman told PBS:
We would love to switch to renewables just for our own import bills to be reduced and to be cleaner, to have cleaner fuel. But just that transition, I have had it calculated, would cost us $101 billion without the transmission line changes. Climate resilience costs money. And, right now, all the money basically is going into relief.
“Physics rules against such hyperbole.”
—James Hansen, Sophies Planet
Studies of paleoclimate have seen flood events before—flood management of the Indus dates to 4000 years ago—but never like present times. Today China spends $144 billion per year on water management, including flood control, more than it spends on health care. With $255 billion in IMF debt, Pakistan spends next to nothing. Pakistan’s floods cost it at least $10 billion in 2022 alone, but thanks to years of underinvestment in maintenance, corruption, and disputes between Pakistan’s four provinces over borrowed money, the system of dams and canals that control the Indus River are in a poor state of repair.
Earth has been several degrees warmer, but it took tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years to make that transition. We are accomplishing it now, as we all watch, in under a century. That is less surprising when we consider that following Colonel Drake’s discovery of “coal oil” mid-19th century, we converted 500 million years of sunlight landing on Earth’s surface in the short space of 150 years—releasing more energy and smoke than all the volcanoes in human history.
Tipping Elements
Climate scientists have long emphasized the importance of climate tipping points like thawing permafrost, ocean methane, ice sheet disintegration, deforestation of the Amazon, and changes in ocean and atmospheric circulation. Collectively, climate tipping points increase social costs and global economic risks. Tipping point interactions have not been well examined so far. So, for instance:
The permafrost carbon feedback results in additional CO2 and CH4 emissions, which flow back into the CO2 and CH4 cycles.
Dissociation of ocean methane hydrates results in additional CH4 emissions, which flow back into the CH4 cycle.
Arctic sea ice loss (also known as the SAF) results in changes in radiative forcing (albedo), which directly affects warming, ocean stratification, AMOC, and Rossby waves in the polar vortex.
Disintegration of the GIS and WAIS increases Sea Level Rise.
Dieback of the Amazon rainforest releases both biomass and soil CO2 , which flows back into the CO2 cycle and also changes albedo.
Variability of the Asian summer monsoon directly affects food security per capita which may accelerate deforestation.
New work builds on theories dating back to 2008 when a group of researchers (Lenton et al.) first identified tipping elements in the Earth’s climate system. More real-world data and more powerful computers now expand the list of threatened systems from nine to 16, with seven additional impacts that would manifest regionally rather than globally (such as the West African monsoon and coral reefs around the Equator).
Current global warming of ~1.1°C above preindustrial temperatures already lies within the lower end of some tipping point uncertainty ranges. Several tipping points may be triggered in the Paris Agreement range of 1.5 to <2°C global warming, with many more likely at the 2 to 3°C of warming expected on current policy trajectories.
—McKay, et al., Exceeding 1.5°C global warming could trigger multiple climate tipping points, Science 377:6611 (9 Sep 2022).
The location of climate tipping elements in the cryosphere (blue), biosphere (green), and ocean/atmosphere (orange), and global warming levels at which their tipping points will likely be triggered.
Standing on the bottom third of an exponential curve and looking back, one sees a gentle slope disappearing off below the horizon. Turning around and looking the other way—into the future—one sees a gradually rising foothill backed by a sheer mountain wall. The summit is lost somewhere in the clouds.
In the first two decades of this century, we moved up to perhaps the halfway point where the curve has begun more noticeably to ascend. The doubling rate is the same, but each doubling is more than all the warming and disruption that came before. So far, the 21st century has had more chaotic weather effects than the entire 20th century. The next decade or two will likely more than double that, and double again in the decades following, with each doubling coming at closer intervals to the preceding. At what point will we collectively grasp the significance of the exponential function?
“I would sooner expect a goat to succeed as a gardener as expect humans to become stewards of the Earth.”
—James Lovelock
At two degrees of warming, around 2040 at the latest, the Indian Subcontinent will reach 60 degrees C in summer (140°F). Spain and Europe hit 50. At three degrees? Equatorial regions hit 70 degrees Celsius (158°F) or more. Spain and Europe hit 60. By then, life as we know it will have come to an end.
Repeating History
It’s true, trivially so, that “some people have never had abundance!!” Duh. Tell it to the poor guy picking cotton in those Pakistani fields, in 120 degree heat. The point is that that economics — built on exploitation of the planet, each other, nature, creation — is now coming to an end, a disastrous one, because it was never built to last. The idea that we could exploit our way to infinite prosperity — at least for the 20% of the world lucky enough to powerful and wealthy — was always a kind of delusion.
Now we have to do the hard work of reinventing everything. Or step by step, scarcity will take us to places we don’t want to go, the dark nightmares and abysses of history.
What does scarcity do, sudden plunges into it? It sparks everything from theocracy to fascism to authoritarianism. It triggers the panic and fear that strongmen and demagogues feed on, it ignites an atavistic craving for the security and stability of ultra hierarchical order, it sparks the search for scapegoats. Sudden plunges into scarcity are what unleashes the demons of history — and humanity.
This is where we are.
A recent peer-review journal contained this comment:
Rather than legitimizing the status quo by appealing to existing political elites, scientists should actively collaborate with those groups in society that push for and prefigure sustainable ways of living.
— Commentary: Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future, Frontiers of Science, doi: 10.3389/fcosc.2021.666910
There is a way forward out of this exponential spiral. It is similar to when a plane goes into a death spiral toward the ground. How do you get out of the spiral? You feed it power. In this case the power lies with people, eight billion of them, planting trees, reseeding mangroves, making biochar, rebuilding biodiversity.
Pakistan has held some notable records of its own. Most trees planted in a single day (847,275, held from 2013 to 2017); most ambitious mangrove goal (10 billion trees by 2023); most trees planted in one minute (50,000, in 2021). They know what to do. They just have to keep doing it, even as rivers rise and temperatures soar.
Haque concludes:
The 21st century is here. But we’re still living in the 20th, in the 1930s, to be precise — and if we don’t change, wise up, mature, evolve, grow, we are going to find ourselves back in the 19th, and then the 15th, and right back to the Stone Age, faster than we yet imagine.
Towns, villages and cities in the Ukraine are being bombed every day. As refugees pour out into the countryside, they must rest by day so they can travel by night. Ecovillages and permaculture farms have organized something like an underground railroad to shelter families fleeing the cities, either on a long-term basis or temporarily, as people wait for the best moments to cross the border to a safer place, or to return to their homes if that becomes possible. So far there are 62 sites in Ukraine and 265 around the region. They are calling their project “The Green Road.”
The Green Road also wants to address the ongoing food crisis at the local level by helping people grow their own food, and they are raising money to acquire farm machinery, seed, and to erect greenhouses. The opportunity, however, is larger than that. The majority of the migrants are children. This will be the first experience in ecovillage living for most. They will directly experience its wonders, skills, and safety. They may never want to go back. Those that do will carry the seeds within them of the better world they glimpsed through the eyes of a child.
Those wishing to make a tax-deductible gift can do so through Global Village Institute by going to http://PayPal.me/greenroad2022 or by directing donations to greenroad@thefarm.org.
There is more info on the Global Village Institute website at https://www.gvix.org/greenroad
The COVID-19 pandemic has destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed down climate change, which presents an existential threat to all life, humans included. The warnings could not be stronger: temperatures and fires are breaking records, greenhouse gas levels keep climbing, sea level is rising, and natural disasters are upsizing.
As the world confronts the pandemic and emerges into recovery, there is growing recognition that the recovery must be a pathway to a new carbon economy, one that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backward — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience.
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Thank you Albert 🙏