Dell: Finding a glimmer of hope in global warming

Article Content

Interviewing 100 climate scientists—proper in-depth interviews, two cameras, lights, and all—was a crash course in coping strategies.

Most of these men and women are in a state of silent despair because they know what is going to happen but can’t seem to change it. They feel the need to appear optimistic, but give them half an hour to talk about it and the sadness and despair start to show.

Article Content

All in the service of a book (out now) on how to survive global warming and a series of videos (not yet out) on the same topic, I often shared their despair. Yet, after all these interviews, I did have some hope for the future.

Don’t let that get you in the head. We’re still in the deepest trouble imaginable. But things have gotten better: five years ago, everyone was pretending that we could solve all our problems by simply reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

This is pure fantasy. Global emissions have not fallen in a single year since 1988, when scientists first sounded the alarm, yet climate orthodoxy insists that we can keep temperature rises to 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century simply by reducing emissions.

Most climate scientists would have followed this line faithfully as long as they were able – not to discourage the troops – but that time has passed. In fact, the global average temperature has exceeded this target by +1.5° for one year.

After the current El Niño ends, temperatures may fall back a bit. (This is a natural cycle that dumps some extra heat into the system about every three to seven years.) But by 2030, temperatures will rise permanently back to +1.5°, so what can we do now?

Article Content

The lost time has not been entirely wasted. Solar and wind power are growing faster than anyone expected a decade ago (although not fast enough to cut into the 82% share of electricity generated by fossil fuels).

But most importantly, a generation of inventors, engineers, and entrepreneurs foresaw that once the public woke up to the urgency, there would be great demand for new ways to curb climate warming.

If enough of the new ideas and technologies coming to market today live up to their promise, we may yet make it through this century without runaway global warming destroying our future. But there’s one catch.

We are already in the danger zone. Most climate scientists agree that at around 1.5 to 3.0 degrees of warming, we will pass various “tipping points” that will trigger “feedbacks”: additional warming caused by non-human factors.

For example, parts of the Arctic are warming four times faster than the rest of the planet because sea ice and snow on land are melting. We caused the warming, so it’s our fault, but if we stopped emissions we could stop the melting.

Article Content

However, the melting process exposes dark rock and open water, which absorbs sunlight instead of reflecting it back into space. This will lead to further warming, which is ultimately our fault – but it’s not something we can control. We can’t stop it.

There are a dozen feedbacks like this. We don’t know when they will kick in, but scientists think we’ll trigger them at various points between here and +3 degrees Celsius. That’s the “runaway” zone, so we have to control temperatures while controlling emissions, even if that means doing it artificially.

The good news is that there are some promising ways to get this under control, as they may be necessary. This will be a long and hard fight, but we are not doomed yet.

Gwen Dyer is an independent journalist based in London, UK, and the author of a new book on climate change, Intervention Earth: Lifesaving Ideas from the World’s Climate Engineers. This is the first of two columns on the subject.

Article Content