A thought experiment on the future

Let us imagine for a moment that the 3 largest sovereign CO2 emitters on Earth are not really all that serious about mitigating their impacts on the planetary climate system.  Leave aside the reasons; simply consider the possibility.

Now, taking that as a starting point, what are the things we would want to know in the world that will result?  And how should we determine the priority of finding these things out?

Remember we know many of the first order effects of increase atmospheric CO2 already:

• We know that sea level will rise.
• We know that the surface ocean will become more acidic.
• We know that the average temperature of Earth's atmosphere will rise (and with it over a very long time the heat structure of the oceans will change).
• We know that climate variability will increase.

It is tempting to say that what we need to know is more detail on the above; it is tempting because it is what we know how to do.  We have a very sophisticated climate science infrastructure that can run models and dig deeper and deeper into the natural science minutia.  It is safe and it is a little bit like looking for our keys under the streetlight because the light is better.

But will doing more of the climate science we have been doing for a couple of decades really help us evolve more robust and resilient societal structures?  Will it help us design storm water systems or point to entrepreneurial opportunities?  Will it help natural resource planners design forests and fisheries for the middle of the coming century?  Will it help us design healthly cities for the 3 billion residents we will add to our planet in the coming decades?  Remember we already know the things in the list above, but we have very little sense of what societies will do in the face of those changes.  And we have done very little thinking about how we would adapt to those changes on any scale.

I think that it is time to focus more on the human side of the equation.  Off the top of my head, some of my own answers to the questions I posed in the opening are the following:

• What is the variance in human decision making processes?; and the corollary, What do human decision making processes have in common?
• How do societal adaptive strategies vary with culture and geography?
• How can economies evolve to be more robust in the face of increasingly rapid change in both the natural and human landscape?
• How do human perceptions and sensitivity to risk vary over Earth?  What is the relationship between that geography and our expectations regarding global weirding?

Apologies to those who already work on these questions; my naiveté merely exposes the distance these questions currently stand from our discussions about how to cope with a changing climate.  I don't think that we should completely abandon climate modeling, but I do think we should be investing many more resources into thinking how humans will react to the coming changes.  And I think we should *carefully* think about how we spend our climate modeling resources.  And finally note that, beyond implying they should have higher priority than they do now, I have not prioritized my list of questions...

Reading the Litany and Counting the Bodies

I have become sensitive of late to what I have come to think of as the "reading of the litany" or if I am feeling more grumpy "counting the bodies".  I first became aware of this at the recent NCSE meeting in DC during Gus Speth's acceptance address.  While I had heard bits and pieces of the litany earlier in the day, Speth gave a extensive reading of the impacts that humans have rent upon the Earth with their implications of impending doom growing with each entry.

More recently, Dan Brayton generated a similar list for the oceans as part of his argument that literary critics should pay more attention to the oceans than they do.  He also showed pictures with the same accusatory message as Speth's list.

I too have done this sort of thing.  In the mid-1990s as we were building the Earth Institute at Columbia, I compiled lists of human impacts and was aghast at their implications.  My sensitivity now is that litanies are read for and with those who are already in the church.  I know that humans now have the upper hand over Mother Nature.  I am worried about it and I have plenty of guilt.  More to the point, the litany is starting to wear me out.  I know things are bad and to a certain extent I have to turn off that knowledge in order to get out of bed each day and attempt to do something about it.

Filling out my title, consider briefly my body count metaphor, which is where this line of thinking actually started.  Think about the following:  If you are getting your ass severely kicked, which is the better strategy: 1) devoting energy to a thorough and ongoing assessment of your losses; or 2) putting full energy into figuring out how to end the beating.  Personally I am going to try to end the beating first and worry about the detail of my losses much later.

I know, part of the reading of the litany is the hope that we can scare people into fighting back through fear of eternal damnation.  Against that though, I recently heard someone note that if the only futures we image are dystopic, we are likely to end up in a dystopia.  And here in lies a great part of my concern:  If the only pictures we paint of the future look like Road Warrior, I am afraid that we are likely to end up in the Thunderdome.

This state of affairs suggests to me that we should spend more time imagining futures that we want rather than obsessing about the futures we don't want.  What if our litany included more items like "All children on Earth receive a free education through grade 7", or "All humans on Earth have access to enough clean water to supply their dietary and sanitary needs."

What we need now is not body counts, but vision.  And not just any vision, we need strong and powerful visions of positive futures.  We need imaginations that are creating and holding on to those visions.  And we need institutions that are preparing future citizens who can bring those positive visions to life.

Plan for a 700 ppm CO2 world?

An editorial in the New York Times today crystallized somethink that has been lurking in the back of my mind for a while now (at least since when I described my book to someone last week).  In that editorial the editors were thinking about the implications of the resignation the UN climate chief, Yvo de Boer, and noting that his departure has deepened the sense of pessimism that the world (that is Earth) will get its act together and create a global effort to manage the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.


The crystal that formed, was the following:  What if the difficulty of reducing CO2 emissions is not a failure of will, but simply a part of the future?  How much of our overwhelming sense of need comes from a harking back to the past and a time when Mother Nature clearly had the upper hand? At what point does a future atmosphere that is connected to pre-industrial Earth fall out of our portfolio of possible Earth futures?


Let me be clear, I think that curbing and managing CO2 emissions should be among the highest priorities of Earth.  And I hold that view because my own working definition of sustainability calls for futures with increasing aggregate human well-being.  I am quite convinced that triple pre-industrial CO2 in the coming century is incompatible with my sustainability goals.


But what if we do hit those high levels?  Will humans go extinct?  I don't think so, but in the context of currently imagined technologies, economies, modes of sovereignty etc, they are quite likely to be much more miserable rather than less so.


So if we think about efforts toward sustainability in the context of managing a portfolio of possible futures and maximizing human well-being over that portfolio, doesn't it make sense to plan for a 700 ppm world so that if it comes to pass we are as well off as possible in it?  


Welcome to monday...