Climate Change: On the Beach, or Going to Holland?

Climate news ranges from serious to depressing to "It's 'Game Over' For Humanity As We Know It." People pose the question: "shouldn't we just party on with the time we have left?"

In Nevil Shute's post-atomic-war On the Beach, Australian survivors of World War III wait for a cloud of radiation fallout to arrive. While waiting for certain doom, some of them attempt to lead normal lives, planting gardens that they will never see. Others in similar scenarios might turn to religion and mysticism; denial; hedonism; or contemplation of fate, possibly through the arts. Others may simply give up and surrender to despair.

Climate change does not mean certain doom for humanity. Our world will change, and we must accept its changes, but the changes do not automatically mean the end of the world. Compare being on the beach with going to Holland. This short, beautiful parable was written by the parent of a child born with a disability, analogizing it to a dream vacation in Italy. Instead of going to Italy, you learn you're going to Holland. You're angry and disappointed...until you see that Holland has tulips and windmills. It's not worse than Italy. It's just different. For the rest of your life, you will face the loss of that dream:

And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away... because the loss of that dream is a very very significant loss.

But... if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn't get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things ... about Holland.

Two recent reports illustrate the stark difference between choosing to live on the beach of business as usual and going to Holland.

The United Nations Environmental Programme Compendium 2009 could be summed up as Climate worse than we thought. A lot worse. Even if we enact an economy-wide cap on carbon and other countries stick with their plans to reduce carbon, we are still likely to see global temperatures rise between 1.4 and 4.3 degrees Celsius by 2100, with an equilibrium of 2.4 degrees Celsius, which will likely trigger three tipping points. The mainstream media reported that temperatures will rise 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit (but, oddly, missed the tipping point of the UNEP report).

Separately, a British conference tackled the consequences of life at 4 degrees Celsius at 2060. Computer modeling shows wildly uneven impacts all over the globe. Large parts of the inland United States would warm 10 to 12 degrees C. An average of four degrees C masks the worst increases; for example, southern and western Africa and the Arctic could each see rises of 10 degrees C. Water supplies for half the world's population would be threatened, and up to half the world's animal and plant species would die. This "plausible worst case scenario" arises from business as usual in which carbon emissions are not sharply curtailed.

Nevertheless, hope lives.

Betts said: "It's important to stress it's not a doomsday scenario, we do have time to stop it happening if we cut greenhouse gas emissions soon." Soaring emissions must peak and start to fall sharply within the next decade to head off a 2C rise, he said. To avoid the 4C scenario, that peak must come by the 2030s.

In a business as usual scenario, the usual businesses continue to prosper until we all end up on the beach: game over, watching football, drinking, praying, despairing, or carrying on as if nothing has changed. We can, instead, choose to go to Holland. In Holland, we acknowledge the changes we have wrought in the world while mourning the loss of our old way of life. In Holland, there are no polar bears, and humans will be displaced by rising seas. However, Holland has tulips, and windmills, and -- most important -- polders, low lying tracts of land enclosed entirely by dikes. The ever-present threat of sea level rise has led not only to engineering marvels, but also the political marvel of the polder model, emphasizing cooperation despite differences in the face of a common natural enemy.

The choice is stark.

Slouching Toward Copenhagen

A post that I wrote shortly before the Copenhagen climate conference. My pessimism was, I believe, largely borne out by events.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

the spin machine twirls and curls: Email fracas shows perils of trying to spin science

Yeats predicts: "The end of an age, which always receives the revelation of the character of the next age, is represented by the coming of one gyre to its place of greatest expansion and of the other to its place of greatest contraction... The revelation [that] approaches will... take its character from the contrary movement of the interior gyre...." Meanwhile, the spinners succeed and the mainstream media are misdirected in the stolen email story.

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

and people cease listening to inconvenient truths of science and reason as fewer Americans continue to believe in global warming; the Australian opposition party dumps its leader over climate legislation; and a new survey shows that world concerns about global warming have dwindled.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Senate chairs split over climate bill; "Hanging in the balance is one of President Barack Obama’s top domestic priorities, as well as the president’s credibility among potential signatories to an international climate pact." Meanwhile, UN environmental chief calls upon United States and China to raise their offers.

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world

The United States Senate puts off climate bill until spring because, according to Claire McCaskill (D-MO), the climate bill is "really big, really, really hard, and is going to make a lot of people mad." In India, climate loan sharks flourish as droughts and failed crops worsen the cycle of poverty. The country of Tuvalu is drowning and its people migrating to New Zealand.

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

A survey delving into the past 30 years in sub-Saharan Africa reveals that temperature changes match up with a significant increase in the likelihood of civil war. Both the 1994 Rwandan civil war and the 2000s Darfur conflict are generally seen to be wars for scarce resources. The Pentagon begins to war game the implications of climate change including famine, rising sea levels, and natural resource competition.

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

When it comes to the stability of one of the world's most volatile regions, it's the fate of the Himalayan glaciers that should be keeping us awake at night. Although India and Pakistan have entered into a treaty regarding use of waters flowing from Himalayan glaciers, the treaty's success depends on the maintenance of a status quo that will be disrupted as the world warms. The Himalayan glaciers supply water to a billion people in India, Pakistan, and western China; a billion people with nuclear weapons; a billion people with nuclear weapons who do not have a history of getting along. Scientists originally predicted that they would largely melt by 2035, but their melt has accelerated. Meanwhile, California's water woes are just the beginning for the United States as water becomes the new oil.

The best lack all conviction,

Climate science is not and never will be settled, the RealClimate editors say, while acknowledging that naysayers such as Wall Street Journal editors will seize upon smidgens of uncertainty. Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) wants to consider other options besides the cap and trade bill approved by the House, and leftists attempt to resurrect the idea of a carbon tax.

while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Hacked Emails give Inhofe fuel for climate change debate. Four Republicans (Representatives Sensenbrenner and Issa and Senators Barasso and Vitter) have demanded that the Environmental Protection Agency cease all work on greenhouse gases. Sarah Palin uses Facebook to demand that President Obama investigate the "snake oil science" of climate instead of going to Copenhagen. Representatives Joe Barton and Greg Walden call for hearings on NASA scientists.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Pope tells Copenhagen participants to respect God's creation and promote development while respecting human dignity and the common good.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

Copenhagen's green credentials obscure unpleasant facts, such as Denmark's continued reliance on coal-fired plants, Danish society's highly consumerist society, and its beef habit (in 2002, the average Dane consumed a whopping 321 pounds of meat -- nearly a pound a day. For Americans, the figure was 275 pounds).

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

Australia faces collapse caused by desertification. Wildfires in February 2009 (late summer) killed hundreds, and November 2009 (spring) broke so many records "that for a lot of places, even average conditions for the rest of the month will be easily enough to break existing records," says a climatologist. A new dust bowl has emerged in California's Fresno County.

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Climate drama climax looks elusive: "Too little time and too little agreement, however, especially between rich and poor countries, mean the 192-nation Copenhagen conference is likely to produce, at best, a framework — a basis for continuing talks and signing internationally binding final agreements next year." Carbon pledges made to date will stoke potentially catastrophic 3.5 degrees Celsius warming by century's end, warns the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and energy specialists Ecofys. The pledges on the table will not halt emissions growth before 2040, let alone by 2015 as indicated by the IPCC. Negotiators at Copenhagen face deep sets of fault lines, including rich vs poor nations, developed vs developing countries, Poland and Estonia vs the rest of the EU, island nations vs time, OPEC vs clean technology, and urgency vs inertia.

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle

The earth is the hottest it's been in 2,000 years, the National Academy of Sciences reported in 2006. More recently, a paper authored by Northern Arizona University professors found the warmest temperatures in 2,000 years at a time when the Arctic would be cooling if not for greenhouse gas emissions overpowering natural climate patterns.

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Is a revelation at hand for an inherently cautious group? Will bickering nations unite against a common enemy? Or will things fall apart as the Earth cannot hold its people?