non-fiction book --- onward

So, I'm about 1500 words into the next chapter, which is chapter five of twelve. I'm actually on schedule. The last chapter was about path dependence, denialism and the idea of problem vs. predicament. This chapter is going to be about system collapse. It's a depth of winter chapter.

My son Sam has said that he won't read the book. "It's just too hard." I wonder what his daughter Torrin will think about it, twenty years from now.

projections

It's really hard to read the projections for 2035. Emotionally difficult. I can only read a little bit and then I play some solitaire or do up some dishes.

The forecasters are in three basic camps.

First, there's the denialists who say that the earth is mighty and we are small and our works are insignificant; there may be some small change but all this doom and gloom is either psychotic or a well managed hoax to further the progressive agenda. I place the really religious people who believe that this is all of God's plan to punish us or the start of the Second coming as a subset of this group. The folk who believe that all the earth's systems are just too complex for the scientists to know anything one way are the other are also in this group.

Then there are the majority of the folk who know that the projections, if we don't make any changes, are really grim, especially for those people who live in the third world (isn't it always grim for people who live in the third world?) but who think that deus ex machina, science will save us. Most of these folk have no idea how grim the projections are -- when they do read something really disturbing, they figure that it's media hype. The the people who advocate geoengineering are in this group.

And then there are the folk who believe that, like the Newsroom clip, we are fucked. There are quite a few in this camp who suggest a "palliative care" outlook on life, that is, enjoy what time we have left and if it gets too bad at the end, feel free to take the easy way out. Included in this group are nut-jobs like me who are thinking maybe there's something we can do to increase the chances that our grandchildren might survive the next fifty years.

This is the thing: We're looking at an increase of 3.5 degrees Celsius by 2035. Since about 1880 or so, when the Industrial Revolution was gathering steam, we've upped the world temp by 0.85 °C. Most reputable climate scientists are saying that, taking the feedbacks into consideration (you'd think that this would be simply assumed, but no, most projections, including the much-depended-on IPCC projections, don't include much from feedbacks) we'll see an additional 2.64°C of warming by 2035. That's over three times the warming we are currently experiencing in less than one fourth the time. (Though, to be more precise, two-thirds of our current warming has occurred since 1970, so ... yeah, I dunno, that doesn't make me feel any more hopeful.)

We could mitigate this somewhat if all the people on the planet stopped using fossil fuels now. Since there is no way that all the people on the planet will stop using fossil fuels now, we won't have much success with mitigation. Reducing fossil fuels at the level we're currently considering will perhaps give us a year or ten (if anything at all). Significantly reducing our world carbon output, say 50% or more, will give us a decade or two. And geoengineering! What could go wrong!

But we are currently in a position that the feedbacks alone -- loss of arctic albedo, methane release from the oceans and tundra, and stored heat in the oceans -- will be as significant as all the carbon we're putting in the atmosphere and can bring modern agriculture to collapse by itself, even if we were to stop using all fossil fuels tomorrow. When you add the carbon we're putting in the atmosphere *and* the feedbacks -- it's like hitting a brick wall at 200 mph instead of 100 mph.