THE UNINHABITABLE EARTH: LIFE AFTER WARMING - David Wallace-Wells

[Applause] thank you thank all of you for coming i really want to especially thank greg for that introduction it's really um an honor to be introduced by him and especially in such embarrassingly flattering terms um i may take the sort of full allotted hour here i'm i would like to be able to take questions from you but it's possible that i may go all the way through in which case please feel free to come to the book signing after even if you're not going to buy a book or get a signing i'm happy to talk to anyone who wants to talk in the event that i don't get to talk to here so please do come um so as greg mentioned as john mentioned i'm here to talk about climate change and i always like to start um by with a sort of a a disclaimer a caveat which is to say that i i'm a weird person to be telling you about climate change because i've never really thought of myself as an environmentalist you know i've never gone hiking i've never liked camping i've never owned any pets actually pets kind of terrify me um i've lived my whole life in cities really just one city new york and while i always liked to take trips to visit nature like in places like this i also thought in a really profound way that i was living outside of it in other words like almost everyone i knew i spent my life deluded and complacent about the threat from warming which i thought was happening slowly happening elsewhere and in ways that are a little uncomfortable to admit but i think are quite pervasive also happening probably to people living elsewhere on the planet with whom i didn't have such a direct relationship or connection in each of these ways i've learned i was quite quite wrong like a lot of people or maybe more than some people i've spent the last few years in a sort of dizzying awakening asking a series of dizzying questions about the future all of which amount on some level to the big question you know climate change what the is happening um are we living in the future if we're living in the future already what does the real future look like how grim will it be how can we adapt what kind of life is possible how fully can we continue to count on the promises that were made to us or which we made to ourselves or to our children or grandchildren as we move into an era defined by these impacts in more and more profound ways if you'll bear with me i want to answer all of those questions the what the questions in three ways with sort of three different perspectives each having to do with a matter of speed the first is the speed of climate change itself and the momentum of impacts the second is the speed of human response and third is the speed of our disorientation by climate change which i think is really just beginning and may prove just as profound as the other impacts but first to talk about the speed of climate change itself up until a few years ago global warming was often discussed as a very slow process it had begun in the industrial revolution and it had fallen to us to clean up the mess created by our grandparents so that our grandchildren wouldn't have to deal with the problems it was a story of generations jim hansen who is the climate scientist who most vocally raised the alarm about climate change before congress in 1988 the book that he wrote for general audience on the subject was called storms of my grandchildren that was the time scale we were talking about generations even centuries but in fact half of all of the emissions ever produced from the burning of fossil fuels in the entire history of humanity have been produced in just the last 25 years and that since al gore published his first book on warming it's since the un established its ipcc climate change body signaling unmistakably to the world a scientific consensus of concern it's since the premiere of friends we've done more damage since then than in all the centuries indeed all the millennia that came before which means we have done more damage knowingly than we ever managed in ignorance since greta tunberg was born about one-third of all emissions ever produced have been produced one-third of all the damage has come in her lifetime since joe biden was elected vice president in 2008 on a ticket headlined by canada barack obama who in accepting the nomination noted that that moment would be remembered as the time when the rise of the oceans began to slow when the planet began to heal since that moment the figure is about 25 a quarter of all of the damage ever done in the entire history of humanity has come since joe biden was elected vice president we're not slowing down the five years since the negotiation of the paris accords haven't just been the five highest years of emissions on records they've also been the warmest they saw as much carbon put into the atmosphere as was managed from the speciation of homo sapiens all the way through world war ii five years now i'm 38 years old which means my life contains this entire story when i was born the planet's climate seemed stable there were scientists who worried about the long term but for the time being things were okay but since i was born two-thirds of all global emissions have been produced two-thirds in just the last 38 years and we are now as a result not in a stable situation but on the brink of catastrophe now scientists say we have about as much time 30 years to really take hold of the crisis and indeed that the next 10 years represent the decisive decade that's what they call a decisive decade in which the future course of the planet will largely be determined which means that my life almost certainly will also contain that story too what happens next and what world we will design in response to this crisis in your life almost no matter how old you are will also contain it because that's that's what is meant by decisive decade it's just a decade it's also the decade in which we are beginning to really see the impacts in the global north at least which has long had the luxury of pretending a few natural disasters aside that the climate crisis was a problem for other people living elsewhere whose humanity we felt comfortable discounting when we even acknowledged it when we acknowledged climate change too we compartmentalized it we thought it was just a matter of sea level rise it was just one issue among many action against it could be put off perhaps indefinitely perhaps we might innovate or adapt our way around the need to really dramatically redesign our world the number of what behavioral economists call cognitive biases that have clouded our vision on climate is is practically endless but as we're learning more and more each year indeed each month and really often each day climate change is not a threat that can be compartmentalized or avoided it is everywhere all touching and while there will be adaptation of course the question is fundamentally adapting to what take economics there's considerable disagreement about the ultimate impact of climate change and economic growth but some estimates suggest that unmitigated warming could reduce global gdp by 20 or 30 percent by the end of the century compared to a world without climate change now the world would still be getting richer but it will be 20 or 30 less rich than it would have been without warming 30 is an impact that is twice as deep as the great depression and fundamentally functionally it would be permanent those same those same estimates suggest large portions of the world some of them also the most densely populated would be even harder hit with south asia and sub-saharan africa losing half or more of their potential for economic growth and the scientists who work on those models have told me very clearly those estimates are not a baseline on which we can project new adaptation they already reflect measures of adaptation other economists are a bit sunnier older models have predicted just a few percentage points lost even at levels of warming that would ultimately flood two-thirds of the world's major cities which is one reason those models are no longer held in much esteem more middle of the road estimates suggest it cut to gdp of perhaps 15 that's an impact equal to the great depression compared to a world without climate change mark carney the former head of the bank of england has recently taken to saying that this is his that his base case is for climate to cut global gdp by 25 now keep in mind we live in a country at least where expectations for economic growth are so important to our view of the future and our sense of current um healthy prosperity and flourishing that a decline in economic growth from three to two percent is enough to produce enormous political and social upheaval or take agriculture as with many of the impacts of climate change human innovation and adaptation will soften the blow but estimates of the simple impact of temperature on the productivity to agriculture suggest that by the end of the century with unmitigated warming croplands could be considerably less productive than they are today in theory we could be using that food to feed 50 more people there's a relationship between temperature and violence which means according to some analysis by the end of the century we could be seeing twice as much war as a result of climate change and that relationship doesn't just impact violence at the state level it also impacts violence at the individual level so we would expect to see rates of rape and murder and domestic assault rise as well we can already see that effect in local studies warming will make infectious disease worse make extreme weather much more intense fan the flames of wildfire rupture old infrastructure and destabilize national and local governments as well will be overwhelmed by the challenges that impacts pose to name just a few of the obstacles to true human flourishing that climate change will yield we don't get to focus we don't get to choose whether we will focus on climate change in the decades ahead only what path we will take in responding to it and how equitably and humanely we will manage the future we have made today the planets depending on who you ask and what study you look at 1.2 maybe 1.3 some people say 1.4 degrees warmer than the pre-industrial average now that doesn't sound like much 1.2 1.3 but it already places us entirely outside the window of temperatures that enclose the entire history of human civilization which means that everything we have ever known as a species from the invention of agriculture through the development of the modern nation state you know antibiotics computers pop music hollywood all that is on some level the result of climate climate conditions that we have already left behind the last time carbon concentrations were as high as they are today the planet wasn't 1.2 or 1.3 degrees warmer but about three maybe four there were forests at the south pole and sea levels weren't centimeters but 20 meters higher it's like we've already landed on a new planet with different climate conditions and we have to figure out what of the civilization we've smuggled with us here can survive what will have to be renovated and remodeled and what will have to be discarded and replaced how different are things already you know there are countless ways of illustrating the changes from unprecedented flooding forcing the evacuation of millions in japan and china to bushfires in australia that burned through 46 million acres in a single season last year killing more than a billion animals and choking sydney harbor with so much smoke that the fairies couldn't run a few weeks ago the heat dome killed another billion animals the marine animals off the pacific coast and the salmon and local rivers are effectively boiling but for me the clearest illustration of how different the world is already is this over five years the city of houston was hit by five of what were once called 500 year storms in just a few years in just five years so that term was never all that technical to begin with but i think it reminds us of what a different world we're now living in to think about the meaning even just on a vernacular level 500 year storm you'd expect to hit once every 500 years 500 years ago there were no european settlements in north america another cortez had just landed in mexico so we're talking about a storm that you'd expect to hit once during that entire history the arrival of europeans the establishing of colonies the waging of genocide against the native peoples the fighting of a revolution the building of a slave empire the fighting of a civil war industrialization world war one world war ii the cold war the american empire the end of history september 11th 2008 the pandemic one storm in all that time and houston has been hit by five of them in five years they are literally dealing with millennia of climate disaster compressed into half a decade now you know houston's still standing and california is too despite the horrific fires that they've had and the rest of the american west too and we're still here today thinking about what we can do to respond to this crisis which means that the impacts of warming aren't the whole of our destiny but instead form the natural landscape on which our future will be built and indeed contested humans are adaptable and resilient and innovative that we can also be cruel and ruthless and nationalistic and prejudiced and while society offers countervailing forces benevolence generosity solidarity in times of crisis it's easy to fear that the uglier set of impulses will grow more intense over time as intuitions about resource scarcity and the threat of extreme weather drive mass migration and give credence to a zero-sum view of the world already as we live only with the known knowns of present warming the climate obstacles to equitable human flourishing and the promises of justice and prosperity and global cooperation we would hope to extend to future generations the challenges to those things are of an unprecedented scale and they're only going to grow especially since the signing of the paris agreement we've all heard a lot about two particular warming thresholds 1.5 degrees and 2 degrees that second threshold two degrees has long been called catastrophic warming island nations have called it genocide and african climate diplomats have called it certain death for their continent since paris scientists and activists and sympathetic politicians have often argued that we need to do everything we can to avoid two degrees of warming and to try to limit temperature to 1.5 degrees they're right we do need to move as fast as we possibly can that's in part because every tenth of a degree matters but 1.5 degrees is almost certainly in my view already out of reach and far from a worst case scenario two degrees may prove like a best-case outcome so what does that look like well to begin with it's been estimated that as many as 150 million additional people would die of air pollution at 2 degrees compared to 1.5 150 million that's death at the scale of 25 holocausts or 10 great leaps forward flooding events that used to hit once a century could hit some places once a year in the american west wildfires that have terrified the world the last few years could grow six-fold possibly more in many cities in south asia and the middle east it would be routinely so hot during summer that going outside especially on hot days certainly working outside on those days would mean risking heat stroke and possibly death which is one reason the un believes we may also see 200 million climate refugees by 2050 perhaps more that could be a very bleak future at two degrees and and warming above that level is a very real possibility too with the amount of suffering growing degree by degree indeed each by each tenth of a degree that all sounds i'm guessing uh like bad news um which you know it is it's terrible news obviously but you know the impacts only tell half the story human response will be the other and on that point i think even the impacts themselves contain a silver lining and some degree of possibly perverse hope and what i mean by that is this as awful as those scenarios seem and as terrible as it would be to live through them they are also ultimately a reflection of our power over the climate if the world gets to some of those endpoints two degrees three degrees four degrees it'll be because we made that warming happen it will be because of choices that are made now and in the near future which means of course that we can make a different set of choices too and that won't be easy at the national level and the international one our politics are often tangled and rivalrous change is disruptive even when it's beneficial the solutions aren't simple but complicated entrenched interests will fight to keep things the same even at the expense of the planet as they have now for decades but our hands are on those levers which means we can write the story of the planet's climate future rather than simply living in fear of it and not just can we will because in action's just another form of action we're going to be writing that future you know whether we like it or not and not just writing it but living it and not just as observers but as protagonists the language sort of makes me uncomfortable honestly but it's the sort of story that we used to only recognize in mythology and theology a single generation that has brought the planet to the brink of disaster now tasked with averting it and securing for the future of the whole species a relatively livable stable prosperous just and equitable world we cannot wait that brings me to the second speed which is the speed of human response and by the way thank you for bearing with me on that apocalyptic tour i used to say if you had a hard time looking at climate projections it'll be even harder living with them but lately i've been turning over the opposite perspective in my mind too which is that what looks like apocalypse in prospect often looks just like grim normality by the time we get to it and maybe even not so bad once we've lived through it this is an indictment of our capacity to normalize because those apocalypses are real and they are the same but it's also a tribute to our capacity to adapt and respond and humans do respond in fact we are already so i finished the manuscript of my book in the fall of 2018 which is not that long ago i hadn't even heard of greta tinberg then no one had she had just started striking outside of swedish parliament a lonely friendless 15 year old with a single sign a few years later she is an icon of a truly global political movement much much bigger than herself back in 2018 the ipcc hadn't published its landmark 1.5 degrees report outlining how essential avoiding two degrees really was and also what kind of world war ii scale mobilization was necessary to achieve it that's the report that gave us the talking point that we need to cut our emissions in half by 2030. in the us in 2018 we hadn't even started talking about a green new deal that was the name of jill stein's climate platform and with only a few exceptions hardly anyone wielding any power anywhere in the world was talking seriously about eliminating emissions only reducing them many in those positions of power were still engaged in campaigns of denial not even bothering to pay lip service to the urgency of the climate crisis in much of the scientific literature we were still using the phrase business as usual to describe an emissions scenario with a median warming outcome of four degrees celsius twice as bad as that catastrophic level that was what we used to call business as usual now here we are just a few years later and honestly the whole world does look different today business as usual is probably about three degrees celsius perhaps even below that there's been a global political awakening about climate change not just with climate strikers but all through the world's population who are increasingly concerned about extreme weather and what it means for our future on the planet the age of climate denial has effectively ended thanks in part to those activists and the extreme weather that they've grown up with you know gerald bolsonaro of brazil aside practically every leader of every country and every major figure in every corporate and industrial sector now feels obligated because of protest and social pressure economic realities and cultural expectation to at least you know make a show of support for climate action it'd be nice not to have to count lip service as progress but you know honestly given where we were it is progress and while the pandemic offers ultimately mixed lessons about climate change i think the first one it taught me was this the world was willing to change quite dramatically and quite quickly out of concern for the livelihood and well-being of fellow humans daily life was upended for billions at something of the drop of a hat and climate action continued during the pandemic ambitious net zero pledges were made here sorry were made in south korea by japan many of the member states of the eu and the eu itself by joe biden in the u.s and perhaps most consequentially by xi jinping and china all told malden more than two-thirds of all global emissions now committed at least nominally to a rapid pathway of decarbonization and what's perhaps most remarkable about those pledges is that they were made outside the realm of international climate politics not as a part of a paris-style negotiation where some countries were bullying others or in some cases just appealing to the better angels of their nature shaming them guilting them but they were made by individual nations thinking about their own economic well-being in clear-eyed and rational ways and coming to the conclusion that faster decarbonization was better for them no matter what anyone else on the planet did seeing that greener was better for them now this signal is a major sea change in the way that economists and policy makers see the challenge of decarbonization for a generation they worry that a green transition would be too burdensome and expensive a moral necessity but a difficult one it would be better to put off if at all possible almost universally they now see the equation in the opposite way that decarbonizing faster will be better for everyone with returns arriving much sooner one estimate suggests the necessary investment would pay off fivefold another that the returns would show up within a decade this is the logic and it is powerful decarbonization will pay this calculus isn't just true for well-off nations like the us who've benefited most from warning and have the most resources to effect change it's also true of the world's developing nations if they could only get the support they needed from wealthy countries who have promised it to aid them in their transitions this is all unprecedented and to some degree exhilarating but just moving in the right direction unfortunately isn't sufficient given the timelines we're facing simply joining the race is not the same thing as winning it and while in a certain way in 2021 it seems like everything has changed when it comes to climate action it's also simultaneously true that almost nothing has or not yet we're talking the right talk but we haven't yet begun to really walk the right walk in 2020 thanks to the pandemic global emissions fell by about seven percent roughly the amount we need to cut each year to bring us in line with the ipcc goals of 2030 but we're not going to be cutting another seven percent this year in fact nowhere close the iaa just today published an estimate that 2021 emissions will be higher than 2019 2022 will be higher than 2021 and 2023 will be higher than 2022. in the midst of the pandemic i spoke with cristiano figueres who is the former head of the unfccc which was basically the organization that organized the paris accords who described to me the critical importance of coveted relief packages to come as an unprecedented opportunity for governments to invest in a new stable climate future we're going to be spending all this money she said we might as well be making our future livable but the same iea report that came out today found that only two percent of covert relief spending was directed towards decarbonization and the tragedy of that is clear when you look at just what is necessary because another recent paper found that we could bring about global decarbonization for only about half of what had already been spent on covet relief which means we're already we're already playing in the ballpark of spending that we would need to make this happen we're just not focused on the right priorities when just a few years ago the world scientists described the decarbonization path necessary to avoid catastrophic warming as a world war ii scale mobilization in global that had to begin in 2019 that's what they meant the recent wave of net zero pledges if fulfilled may have shaved as much as a full half degree off of warming this century but they still leave us far short of the paris goals especially that 1.5 degree target but even the more modest two degree threshold the iea recently called for an end to new investment in fossil fuel infrastructure which marked truly a dramatic shift in climate seriousness in the world energy community but simply running our existing infrastructure through to their date of completion is enough to blow past 1.5 degrees and bring us quite close to two if we don't build a single other you know oil pipeline extract a single other piece of coal beyond what is already planned we're still gonna come quite quite close to two degrees so this is meant to be the decisive decade we're being awfully indecisive about it so far the current rate of emissions will exhaust our carbon budget for 1.5 c before well before 2030. the budget for 2c is a bit longer about 25 years but according to the u.n staying below that level would require a tripling of current stated ambitions and what worries me most about that is i don't know how much more those ambitions can grow if joe biden wants to decarbonize the american electricity sector by 2035 i'm not sure that it's possible we could do it by 2030 or 2025. i think we already may have reached our maximal ambition when it comes to pledges which means that the goal ahead of us maybe it may be more important for us to make real the pledges that have already been made rather than hoping to raise the level of rhetorical ambition it also means we need to make real and concrete the commitments of the wealthiest in the world to those with less who might otherwise be stranded in a world pummeled by warning warming and i think it also means we need to get real about the challenges of adaptation as well recognizing that the climate of our grandparents and even the climate of today will not be with us for long and that the world that we will be living in all 8 or 10 billion of us will be defined by climate impacts we will regret not having avoided when we have the chance and adaptation goes well beyond you know green climate fund or green no deal it means probably some amount of defensive flood infrastructure and some planned retreat some scientists i know say it only makes economic sense to save half the world's coastline large early warning systems and flood shelters for extreme weather events like those that we've seen succeed in bangladesh and really reduce the mortality risk from extreme weather as compared to their neighbor myanmar where they don't have those warning systems new kinds of crops and redesigned cities and new transportation systems all to survive new levels of heat and other unprecedented weather an entirely new kind of concrete a different approach to agriculture and land use policy a totally fresh strategy of forest management and residential developments in places susceptible to wildfire perhaps the eradication of mosquitoes via gene drive and the building out of a massive negative emissions infrastructure both natural and industrial that's to take carbon out of the atmosphere that's already up there since just abating the hardest to decarbonize sectors of the problem that was recently estimated would require if you wanted to use trees it would require land 5 to 15 times the size of texas and if you want to do it through industrial process known as direct air capture would require somewhere between a third and half of today's global energy production and that's just the very hardest to decarbonize sectors it does not mean we can use that to drive our gas cars longer or burn coal longer it's just for heavy industry and jet fuel the more that we count on it to help us on these other areas the easier to decarbonize parts of our problem the bigger the scale of build out will have to be maybe multiple times the size of today's oil and gas business even though of course there's no market for captured carbon at the moment which means there's no incentive for anyone to build that infrastructure this is really the challenge of a century thankfully we are starting so the first speed i talked about is pretty distressing the second offers maybe some amount of measured optimism you know decades of inaction of it just to underline of inaction despite perfect knowledge of the situation and the problem decades of inaction have given us a grim baseline of future changes but we are already moving rapidly to limit warming to something close to that level but not every story here is moving in the same direction which brings me to the third speed i want to talk about the speed of our disorientation now you'll forgive me if this portion of the talk is a little bit scattered that's sort of the point that climate change will scatter things and by that i don't just mean people or ecosystems but also ideas beliefs cultural expectations worldview politics geopolitics one of the things i tried to do in my book that i think distinguishes it from some of the other books that had been written in similar terms was to really think about what the humanities of climate change would look like what it means for the way that we live on the planet not just what it means to take seriously the science to take one personal example you know as mentioned earlier i'm 38 i was born in 1982 i really grew up in the 90s um in the us of the 90s in the new york of the 90s and though i was sophisticated enough to be skeptical of it at the time i also basically imbibed a kind of end of history vision of the future that would govern my life which is to say i really believed in progress i believed that history brought progress it wouldn't be neat there would be losers but over time over the course of generations the world would go grow more prosperous more equitable more free more just and that you know as i said there would be struggles associated with it in addition to reading the end of history in high school i also read the unabomber's manifesto but i also thought that over time we could really count on that trajectory i don't believe that anymore i went from thinking about the end of history to thinking about what looks like the end of the world and that's not to say that progress is impossible or that the true end of the world is likely i think it very much is not but the set of deep in me like reptilian expectations for the future have really been shaken by you know by september 11th by the great recession and what that's meant by the rise of china but also in a very very profound way by um the threat of climate change and what it will mean for our future another disorientation is to knowledge and human certainty take the heat dome and the pacific northwest which didn't just shatter heat records it shattered them by so much that climate scientists are running around now really freaking out because their models didn't include the possibility of an event that extreme at this point in time with this amount of warming and these are really sophisticated models they don't just make a median project projection they have huge ranges you know not fifth percentile outcomes to 95th percentile outcomes it's basically designed so that anything that happens especially something that's happening just a few years in the future will be contained by that work and the pacific heat german to a lesser extent the flooding that we've seen even more recently in germany lay well outside of those models which means we're really a lot more uncertain about all of this than we thought and for people like me and the climate scientists who i speak with you know that's really destabilizing we used to treat these climate models these climate projections as you know as harrowing as bleak as they were at least they were a road map you know especially if we're thinking about adaptation this is our guide this is what we need to do to respond so what does it mean to have to distrust it or to cast even larger shadows of uncertainty over our future than we have already i think this is you know a lesson we've also learned in the pandemic you know there was a time in january i was looking at the cdc site they collected all of the all the models of how the pandemic would spread two three four weeks out and we had 25 or 30 models and they all had the same fifth percentile the 95th percentile range of their projections and three weeks later the actual outcome of the pandemic lay outside of all but two of the 95th percentile confidence intervals for all of those models um so i think we're learning in a protracted way that maybe began with september 11th um just how unclear and uncertain we should be how much we should build uncertainty and the idea of risk into our models of the future mental models of the future and how much precautionary action we should take in response to that risk rather than assuming that risk is our friend this is you know goes not just for particular impacts like the heat dome it goes i think for ultimate temperature levels as well which is to say we i've put a lot of faith in the last year and the fact that our emissions trajectory seems to be bending so that we could now say that three degrees as opposed to four and a half is our business as usual scenario but the climate system could prove considerably more sensitive than those models suggest we could get our emissions down to where they need to be to be at three degrees and the world could still warm four and a half degrees we really just don't know climate change is also going to transform and disorient our understanding of nature you know truly we've only ever seen nature as a conceptual category when it was under threat when people truly lived in nature they just thought of it as the world we began to worry about it really in the victorian era when human progress became most visible but we're also starting to notice things like you know oh look all the birds are dying um now the insects are too but over the last few hundred years and perhaps especially over the last few decades nature has come to play a certain role in our culture and not just on the environmental left it's been a sort of a shaming force showing us our own destructiveness but it's also a source of spiritual solace a reminder of human humility and of the eternal features of the world and the experience of being alive it's almost like a psychedelic experience we leave the cities we take our deep breaths in nature we go on retreats and we re-center there this is nature as counselor guru shaman and friend but pretty soon i think we'll start to see nature in at least more complicated ways that's because in the meta narrative of climate change it's likely to become at least in certain places in the world no longer an aid in our fight against warming but a force fighting for the enemy you may have seen stories in the last few weeks about the amazon rainforest which has in recent years stopped absorbing carbon dioxide which helps us in our fight against warming and cleaning up a fair amount of our mess and started instead releasing it the technical term for this is that it is turned from what's called a carbon sink into a carbon source now this isn't neatly ineffective warming it's mostly deforestation and human burning the efforts of farmers to clear land in the amazon for their own activities but it's not the first warming about warning about the amazon and it's expected that within a few decades thanks just to the impact of carbon and heat that rainforest could enter a state called dieback in which these forces you know the forces of carbon release could not be pinned on a villainous brazilian president with a terrible environmental policy or the farmers he'd unleashed it would be unfolding beyond our control nature is an angry beast the scientist wally broker used to say sometimes i worry it's more like a like a war machine at the very least as warming worsens it'll stop being our friend warming will also disorient our understanding of time and here i just want to quickly walk through a few effects each of which suggests sort of different models of time since the beginning of industrialization we have in the west built a model of linear time that's basically built on progress the pro the expectation of progress that i was talking about talking about myself as a teenager but if progress slows if economic growth stalls if human suffering increases if we come to see the engine of wealth as something more like a faustian bargain with an ugly climate payoff we may seek some wisdom in older cyclical models of time in part because we will see shadows of earlier periods of history in natural disaster and famine and war another disorientation carbon hangs in the air for centuries at least 300 years according to most estimates and up to a thousand this means that every ounce of carbon ever emitted in the whole history of industrialization is still up there warming the planet the climate doesn't care whether that ounce of carbon was emitted in engels's manchester or in china in the time of xi from the planet's point of view the past present and future of fossil fuels are all the same we're living in an eternal carbon present of course in the history of the planet it's something like the blink of an eye merely the time it takes for a gas carbon dioxide to dissipate and of course that piece of coal itself that we're burning is the result of millions of years of geologic pressure on plant life that's why we call them fossil fuels and that's the carbon that we're releasing when we burn it when an iceberg melts or calves crashing into the sea we're watching history being undone and rapidly thousands perhaps millions of years released suddenly into the present the melting on the other hand is slow if we pass two degrees of warming and initiate the inevitable melt of the planet's ice sheets that will take at the very least many centuries perhaps millennia not climate change at warp speed but the opposite climate emergency unfolding at a tectonic pace too or perhaps theological pace since the choices we make today may lock into inevitability processes that will be unfolding for millions of years after we're gone and before i go just one last example of disorientation and one that maybe has a weird um upbeat if hard to grasp lesson and that has to do with fires and smoke i mentioned earlier scientists expect fires in the american west are going to grow at least six times worse over the course of the century it's actually by 2050 they don't know how to project beyond that because they expect that so much of the west will have burned at that point that we don't know what's going to grow back in its ashes so we don't know how to model burning in 2019 i wrote a story a magazine story about california fire i spoke to eric garcetti the mayor of l.a who's about to become the ambassador to india he just turned 50 the year he was born 60 000 acres in california burned the year he was elected mayor 2013 it was 600 000 a 10-fold increase he was re-elected mayor in 2017 it was 1.2 million so we're doubling in just four years and the year before i spoke with him 2018 it was 1.9 million so it was a 50 increase in a single year in 2020 the fires were more than twice as bad still and they accounted for more than half of all air pollution in the american west which means more particulate matter was being breathed in in people in states like idaho and california and washington and oregon and arizona and utah and all it all the way down the line more people were there was more pollution being breathed in by people in those states than had been pred from the burning of fossil fuels than had been produced by all human and industrial activity combined that air is toxic it makes respiratory disease worse including cova-19 it affects coronary disease and cancers of all kinds it affects the development of children in utero and out of utero and it changes the rates of premature birth and low birth weight so dramatically that the simple introduction of automatic toll collection in american toll plazas reduced them by 10 and 12 simply because cars that drive through atoll emit less exhaust than ones who idle the effect of those toll plazas is to reduce premature birth by 10 or 12 percent in india where air pollution is much much worse 350 000 stillbirths and miscarriages every year are the result of pollution the country as a whole it's been estimated loses almost 10 percent of gdp to the effect of smog air pollution damages cognitive performance so that we have this accidental study in la there was a local oil refinery accident they had to put air purifiers in all the classrooms in a particular district and the effect of putting that single air purifier in those classrooms was the same as cutting the class size by a third it affects dementia it makes doctors who are operating on you more likely to make mistakes during surgery it affects the rate of mental health admissions schizophrenic breaks and crime and though it's not precisely an impact of climate change it is caused by the same thing that is caused by climate change um you know wildfire is only a slice of it it's mostly caused by the burning fossil fuels all told air pollution kills 10 million people every single year now that is a horror i hope it goes without saying a holocaust or maybe two depending on how you want to count every single year and in the u.s the figure is 350 350 000 people died last year from air pollution 350 000 is the same numbers died last year from covet 19. these are really awful facts but they actually kind of suggest two hopeful things believe it or not the first is so air pollution impacts are larger than almost any estimate of climate impacts this century which means that as awful as the future i sketch that may sound when it comes to human mortality we already may be living with the worst of it today we are maybe killing more people from air pollution than will die from climate change at any point in the rest of the century that's a mark of our sociopathic detachment from all that human suffering but it's also a sign that we can to some degree live amidst that suffering and still consider ourselves normal and our lives normal the second thing is that air pollution is getting better probably it's already peaked and as the world turns to renewable energy and electric cars invariably it will get a lot better one hopes especially in those countries in india and sub-saharan africa where the costs are most intense today that means that again at least in terms of human mortality which isn't the only thing we should be measuring but is really important the worst of the impacts from the burning fossil fuels may not just be with us today already they may in fact be behind us now that's a bit dizzying i still don't know how to precisely wrap my head around it as someone has looked at the threat of climate change now for years as a sort of an on rushing wave of suffering which will get worse and it is that but even amidst that suffering some things will probably be getting better too even some important things and you know it's a bit hard to wrap your head around but that's for me one of the big lessons of the climate emergency you're not wrapping your head around it it's doing the wrapping it's wrapping its hands around you around all of us and the grip is only going to get more brutal the longer we wait to move so let's get going thank you i think i don't know how much time we have maybe every time for a couple questions david thank you so we've got we've got some time for a few questions microphones in the aisles please put your hands up high there's one right here this gentleman thanks um well i appreciate your uh sense of urgency about this but i you i'm nearly double your age as most people in this room are and we have been hearing the same warnings and clarion calls really since well before rachel carson um and we are at the stage where we really need to examine what we do about it i think and you know their papers from 40 years ago like they come the constitutional implications of a no growth society and when you think about what we have to do about it it's going to take a major social overhaul and we need to start thinking how we're going to affect all these changes because it doesn't happen overnight and um i think the thing we have the most control over are our social institutions and how they're run and we need to start making the call to maybe get a no growth society or something as radical as josh clark's uh podcast i think you've probably heard of the end of the world or goes through the fermi com paradox and the great filter but maybe it's just time for the humans to let go and let environment go on with the rest of the life um thank you yeah i mean i it's at dinner the other night i describe myself as a human chauvinist so i don't want to let humans let go and i also am from um possibly naive reasons um not yet ready to abandon the hope of growth and future prosperity too i think that as someone who's benefited enormously from it i don't want to see a world in which um we deprive that possibility from of you know deprived billions of people who are still compared to our standards quite poor deprive them of the possibility of of getting wealthier and healthier um i think you know all of the challenges that you're describing are real um this is an incredibly complicated system to undo especially when you get into some of the harder corners of the decarbonization problem we know how to do at least half of it very well and very quickly through decarbonizing the power sector that's not to say that we will do it it's disruptive there are people who want to argue on the other side but it's not a conceptual problem and because of the sea change that i was talking about in economic and policy thinking i don't even think it's a political problem if it's sold properly which is to say it does require considerable public investment state investment thankfully the world is becoming much more open to that project on all fronts although they haven't yet done it so well on climate change but that you know that payoff will come quite quickly and if we are addicted to prosperity and growth as i think to some degree we are and to some degree in unhealthy ways um nevertheless we can point to decarbonization as an opportunity for future growth not not a need to run away from it if you think about a world in which we have basically solved this problem which may be hard to imagine but if you imagine that world where we actually are at net zero then economic growth and for that matter you know population growth which is something a lot of folks ask me about in these q a sessions those don't matter because there's no carbon cost to growing at that point now can we get that far um you know i think we certainly can the question is on what time scale and on that i somewhat share your view you know i often say if we had a century at this point to solve the problem i'd be feeling really good i think we were off to a really good start actually the price of renewables is collapsing the scale of um installation of them is like off the charts high unfortunately you know we've already lost the opportunity to preserve the climate that even the climate we're living in today certainly the climate that we all grew up in and the timelines are much shorter than that which means we need to move much much more quickly but i think we also need to think about the adaptation side of the equation not in a not in the spirit of abandonment that you mentioned although to some degree in terms of managed retreat from coastlines that will be a part of it but in terms of what we can do to design a future that's more resilient and more just and i think there are a lot of things that can be done there um and to a degree they've been sort of underemphasized by the climate movement which has been so um you know powerfully but maybe myopically focused on decarbonization which is ultimately just half of the problem good time for one one more question uh yes this gentleman right there thank you i i would just like to make a quick comment that i'm i'm very glad you to see that you're so optimistic on keeping uh warming at the levels of which you state too for uh there's a brontosaurus in the room of which is methane of which the sensitivities of which are going on and the climate models are struggled to really deal with because i think sensitivity is a lot more sensitive than any of the models and methane as far as my knowledge is is one of the most difficult things to model going forward in particular permafrost and methane hydrides of which there's a lot yeah there's there's twice as much carbon trapped in the permafrost as there is currently in the atmosphere and if it's released much of it will be released as as methane um so methane is a is a worry um you know the the positive thing about methane is that it hangs in the air for just a couple decades unlike carbon which means it may produce a warming spike but as it dissipates we'll have the opposite effect if all of the methane if all the carbon in the permafrost is released as methane that'll be totally catastrophic and it'll push us over the brink of many feedback loops that are really really quite scary um that doesn't seem to be happening at the moment we are dealing with an uptick in methane release but most of the analysis that i've seen in trust suggests that it's coming from fracking and the poor um the poor running of those fracking systems um we haven't yet seen meaningful methane released from either hydrates or the permafrost in super long scale like century long scale climate modeling that's a real worry but on the century scale that most of us are thinking about um personally i'm i don't put it that high on my list of concerns i think that it's unlikely to dramatically change the course of our um warming trajectory although as i said earlier you know uncertainty is uncertainty and we need to take precaution we need to believe in the precautionary principle and take it seriously and not treat risk and uncertainty as an excuse for inaction but the opposite david thank you so much thank you [Applause] um [Music] [Applause] david david will be signing books up at the bookstore 10 and as he said you

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Published: Wed Jul 21 2021