We Need to Accept We're Likely Underestimating the Climate Crisis
One thing that often gets lost amid the growing pile of reports on the escalating climate crisis is that science, as a method of learning about the world, is fairly conservative. The scientific community does not accept a claim until it has been subjected to the scientific process. This includes an incredibly thorough vetting procedure, known as peer review, that essentially consists of scientists tearing at their colleagues' research, trying to poke holes in it. They recreate the experiment themselves, repeatedly, to see if they find the same results. Something that gains acceptance with the vast majority of the scientific community, like the consensus that climate change is happening and human activity is causing it, has been so extensively examined by so many different people over so many years that it may very well be one of the things we, as a species, can be most confident is true about 0ur world.
Yet, because fossil-fuel interests exercise so much power in our politics (indeed, they have captured one of our two major political parties, exercise power over the other, and, through these and other intermediaries like think tanks, influence the wider establishment media), the issue is often framed as a matter of opinion or belief or political allegiance. The Republican Party is the only major political party in the industrialized world that disputes the scientific consensus, but their extremist position has warped our discussions of the issue. We discuss whether it is real, rather than what to do about it. They and their allies attack climate scientists as alarmists-or, in more fevered formulations, evil instruments of the "globalist" class. Their allied think tanks pay individual scientists $10,000-a-pop to dispute the consensus with cherrypicked data and studies that have not been subjected to peer review.
This politicization has had a measurable effect: Americans trust scientists in general, but climate scientists less so. The same goes for other politicized scientific areas, like vaccination. 85 percent of Republicans reject the idea that climate change is a serious problem that requires action.
Naturally, climate scientists are even more conscious than their peers in other fields about getting out on a limb. That's the premise of a 2017 New York magazine article, which traces the significant difference between the dangers most scientists are right now willing to publicly articulate-those for which there is overwhelmingly strong scientific footing already-and the worst-case scenario. The New York Times published a report Tuesday on a new study that once again suggests things are happening faster, and will have more dire consequences, than scientists were previously willing to articulate. In short, we are steadily turning our gaze towards the WCS.
Greenland’s enormous ice sheet is melting at such an accelerated rate that it may have reached a “tipping point,” and could become a major factor in sea-level rise around the world within two decades, scientists said in a study published on Monday.
The Arctic is warming at twice the average rate of the rest of the planet, and the new research adds to the evidence that the ice loss in Greenland, which lies mainly above the Arctic Circle, is speeding up as the warming increases. The authors found that ice loss in 2012, more than 400 billion tons per year, was nearly four times the rate in 2003. After a lull in 2013-14, losses have resumed.
And then the Times spelled out a recent pattern.
The study is the latest in a series of papers published this month suggesting that scientific estimates of the effects of a warming planet have been, if anything, too conservative.
The Times points to a study last week suggesting ice loss in Antarctica is more severe than previously thought, and sea levels are rising faster as a result. They also flagged a study that found the oceans are getting warmer, faster than previously thought. That raises the specter of a feedback loop, where warming water leads adjacent ice to melt faster, which in turn yields more surface area for water, which stores more heat.
Warmer water also leads to more ferocious storms, with stronger winds and huge levels of rainfall. It also leads to coral bleaching, which devastates coral reefs-a foundational feature of ocean ecosystems. This is one factor in why, even back in 2015, scientists believed humans could be precipitating a mass extinction event in the world's oceans-part of a global acceleration in disappearing species that scientists now believe constitutes the sixth mass extinction event in the planet's history. We haven't even mentioned the droughts or the fires.
This month's new findings follow on two landmark appraisals of where we are: the National Climate Assessment, a joint effort by 13 agencies of the United States government, based on the work of 300 scientists, found the crisis will have devastating impacts on the economy, human health and quality of life, water access, and a litany of other areas. A report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change-compiled by 91 leading scientists from 40 different countries based on more than 6,000 scientific studies conducted by still more scientists-was more apocalyptic. It found that human civilization as we know it will be in severe peril by 2040, and that we have 12 years to dramatically change course to avoid that scenario.
Quite simply, the time has come to completely reframe the way we talk about the climate crisis. It is no longer acceptable to equivocate or muddy the waters on the question of whether climate change is real and man-made. Everyone who studies it, and whose work is vetted by the wider scientific community and come out the other side as accepted, says that it is. Anyone who continues to question whether it is happening should be ostracized from the public debate. They should not be invited on cable news or the Sunday Shows to spread misinformation and outright lies. These voices have been granted legitimacy for far too long. They have a right to serve as hired guns for fossil fuel interests, but they have no right to a megaphone. Chuck Todd's Meet The Press provided a hopeful sign in that respect: having hosted a climate denier from a right-wing think tank to dispute the consensus after the National Climate Assessment in November, he devoted an entire show in January to climate change-with the explicit premise that it was real.
The only acceptable discussion in a society that is at all tethered to reality, and which retains even a modicum of moral character, is what to do in response to the crisis. The left will favor solutions where government takes the lead in transforming our energy system away from fossil fuels and toward a coalition of renewable sources like wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, and nuclear, with natural gas as a bridge fuel. A conservative party with a grasp on reality might favor incentivizing private industry to carry out this transformation. But the simple fact is that the transformation is necessary. We must drastically reduce the amount of heat-trapping gasses we put into the atmosphere. Anyone who disputes this is misinformed, or getting paid to misinform.
The evidence is growing that the consequences if we do not act will be worse than we've long thought. It may well be, as David Wallace-Wells wrote in New York, "a failure of imagination." We cannot fail to imagine a solution.
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