With the best of intentions, climate scientists might be doing an ethical disservice to the world.
The problem is not the unavoidable (and shrinking) uncertainty in their increasingly sophisticated data-driven models, but the outward naivete of their warnings. Every time a paper or opinion piece underscores the need for radically lowering our species’ carbon footprint in order to prevent severe and long term losses to human welfare, they aren’t wrong, but they are right in an irrelevant way.
Quite simply, we lack the political, social, and technological know-how to even approach a reduction in fossil fuel usage quick and deep enough to prevent drastic changes to the world’s climate, even beyond those already locked-in by the impact we have already had on the atmosphere. Every short- and mid-term indicator, in fact, points to the opposite direction.
Ecologically-minded engineers and product designers are doing the same thing, by the way. No- or low-footprint products and processes are less harmful than the traditional alternatives, but the cold equations of atmospheric chemistry dictate that “green” products and processes don’t counteract the effect of the traditional alternatives. A bicicle powered by a man fed by a petrol-powered agricultural industry and goods transport network is at best marginally less of a problem that a car, and it’s still on the negative side of the balance.
At this point, it’s not even clear that we could roll back our fossil fuel usage fast enough to make a difference without causing untold human suffering through the impact on our energy-dependent infrastructures. We didn’t develop in time the technological substitutes that would have allowed us to avoid catastrophic disruptions to both the climate and our industrializde life-support systems. That would have been the best option, but it’s too late.
This isn’t to say that we don’t need to do it. The fact that our old age will be characterized by deeply problematic climate patterns isn’t an excuse to keep making things even worse for those being born now. There’s a difference between a climate catastrophe and a serious attempt at species suicide-by-climate-change. But we also need to work fast and hard at adaptation and mitigation measures.
It’s too late to save the planet we had. Time to figure out how to best live in the one we built, and make sure we don’t make it even worse.
~
IEET Blog
A depressing and sobering analysis, but a true one. I would much prefer that we solve our climate problems through changes in energy production and use, but we should have started years ago. Much as I worry about unintended consequences, we need to start thinking of geoengineering techniques to mitigate climate change.