Embedded Files
Re-Thinking Climate
The cartoon shows roughly where we would be going if this were a short course—but I think that this crisis is best served up in 30-minute segments. The yellow posters are the three types of climate intervention.
I will spend a few paragraphs on emissions and accumulation, more on the uneven heating and its consequences for global drought and the Arctic melting. Kinks in the polar jet stream will be postponed to another talk but I will cover the surges in extreme weather they promote. Climate fixes are another topic too large, but I will cover the lead-time problems that force us into big Manhattan Projects for shade, CO2 removal, and resilience.
There have been a number of surprises in the last forty years, mostly from nonlinearities. Climate is a complex dynamic system, full of surprises. Rather like brains and evolution, my other fields of study.
I am not the ideal tour guide for our future climate surprises, but then no one is. Yet since 1980, I have been participating in the climate scientists’ debates, asking questions as the new concepts unfolded. You might call me an armchair climate analyst.
I did not start with an interest in global warming, rather with why our ancestors’ brain size had managed to triple during the back-and-forth of the ice ages spanning 2.3 million years.
About 1983, really abrupt climate changes were discovered peppering the paleo-climate ice cores. There were several dozen in just the last ice age cycle. For many, the transition time from cool-and-dry to warm-and-wet was a mere five years.
I am an emeritus medical school professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine with a Ph.D. in physiology and biophysics, so I have taught many of the same physiological concepts as the climate scientists do (circulation, oxygenation, turbulence, feedbacks). But my research also involved things that go 'bang' like the nerve impulse or flicker on-and-off, which they rarely encounter.
On occasion, I wrote up the news about those abrupt climate shifts of the past. It was only after my 1998 cover story for The Atlantic, “The Great Climate Flip-flop,” that I began paying serious attention to global warming and the future prospects of abrupt climate change.
In the subtitle, “Opening a Second Front in the Climate War,” war is a metaphor. But climate change is also likely to be a setup for a boots-on-the-ground war. Indeed, quite a few of them in the next decade.
You might also wonder “What is the first front?” It is the notion that going on a fossil fuel diet will fix our climate problem—or, at least, slow down the arrival of big trouble a little. Emissions reduction, one might say, is not a very ambitious goal.
To start, one might ask, what are emissions? Fifty years ago, they were what came out of tailpipes and smokestacks contributing to visible air pollution. It was out of that context that we also began worrying about invisible, odorless greenhouse gases and we inherited the terminology of the irritating stuff—and its treatment plan, emissions reduction.
The accumulation took the form of smog. It included black particulates (say, old diesel bus exhaust) and volatile organic compounds that sunlight subsequently made into irritating substances.
Fortunately, they can be washed out of the air by the next good rain. When the accumulation becomes too irritating, some cities on the other side of the world try to hurry up the next rain by seeding clouds.
So much for visible air pollution.
The same phallic sources, tailpipes and smokestacks, also spew out invisible, non-irritating molecules—a few of which are ‘greenhouse’ gases.
The insulating blanket of CO2 overhead has been gradually growing since 1750, thanks to burning fossil fuels. Carbon dioxide is currently about three-quarters of that problem. It has increased 50% by now, halfway to doubling.
We also speak of the release of greenhouse gases as emissions, leading most people to think we can treat excess CO2 in the same way as we treated visible air pollution.
The 1960’s prediction of serious global warming came with the commonsense recommendation to reduce emissions. Emissions reduction was helping to reduce visible air pollution by the 1990s, so reducing the emissions of the invisible greenhouse gases seemed the obvious thing to try. Gradually, of course (one would not wish to inconvenience the providers of fossil fuels, the biggest business sector in the world). Actually, cleaning up the CO2 excess was rarely mentioned; it had no parallel in the visible pollution story, thanks to seldom-mentioned rain.
Yet when it comes to climate, many people confuse the rate (“emissions”) with the root problem, the lingering CO2 accumulation. At least in science speak, emissions is always a rate like speed, usually the yearly amount. Do not conflate it with the lingering accumulation that subsequently causes the warming.
That is all too easy to do when the same word, ‘emissions,’ can be used for either. In informal conversation, emissions may mean either emissions-the-annual-rate or the emissions accumulated over many decades. To get a feeling for the potential confusion, imagine that ‘miles’ could refer to either miles per hour or to miles traveled.
Little wonder that many people think that “Zero Emissions” will make the accumulation go away. No, it will not. Now let me introduce a second way to get confused about climate action: a bad analogy.
Since the 1970s, climate talk has focused on the analogy to dieting, as many people understand that approach to an excess. Yet, despite the decades of doubling-down rhetoric, the annual bump up in the carbon dioxide excess is now 50% greater than at the end of the 20th century. That is not success.
Now let us split up global warming into two parts.
From 1900 until about 1985, if land temperature rose, the sea surface temperature went up about the same amount, except between World War One and Two (a time of considerable drought). The upward trend in surface temperatures began about 1977.
What we call global warming is a weighted mix; since there is more than twice as much ocean as there is land surface, the global average temperature stays about a third of the way between ocean and land on the graph. Before 1985, all three were always tight together and the differences seemed not to matter much.
But after 1985, the land temperature has been rising three times as fast as the ocean surface. When the temperature contrast over coastlines is enhanced like that, one expects that some onshore winds will change. Perhaps they will deliver their moisture in new patterns, changing where and when floods and droughts occur.
Indeed, the global land area in drought doubled between 1983 and 2003. That reduces the usual evaporative cooling of surface air.
For example, springtime drought causes land to dry out earlier in the summer. And so land runs out of evaporative cooling in early summer, rather than late summer. This is not a problem for the ocean surface.
By the 1990s, we began speaking of climate change because of a wider range of things going wrong than just global warming, including unseasonable cold snaps that confused those who expected warming. But those recommending actions still stuck with their original narrative: reduce the annual additions to the accumulation overhead.
In fifty years of attempting emissions reduction, there has been no downturn in the annual CO2 trend. Worse, the trend became 50% steeper after 2000. Then the climate threats worsened in the 21st century.
Yet neither sufficed to alter the “carbon diet” treatment plan. Instead, we got the standard exhortation for diets: double down on your individual efforts. “Every little bit counts!” And so we got many advertised claims of “climate solutions” and “climate fixes” that were mere hyperbole about less-than-1% effects. Even vegetarians claimed to have a climate solution.
But even the more thoughtful climate recommendations resembled dieting advice—and diets often fail. For something so important, we needed an action plan that was certain to work.
Why so little concern, then and now?
“Stop doing what caused it” is usually a good guide—except when it isn’t. It is often insufficient. A move in the right direction may not count as a fix. And reducing emissions does not work like many assume it will.
The reason why reducing the annual smokestack and tailpipe emissions seemed to work for the visible air pollution of forty years ago was that nature was always cleaning up the accumulation of smog. Many of the tiny, suspended particles were brought down by the next good rain. With reduced emissions, there was slower smog buildup between rains—and so irritating levels of smog were not reached before the following rain.
That seemed to be Success! But the trouble is….
It does not work that way for carbon dioxide. While rain may clean up 80% of the smog within weeks, an 80% removal of excess CO2 takes a thousand years. We do not have a thousand years to wait, which is why we are forced to do the clean-up job ourselves.
Someday? Another back-burner project? Not this time. Indeed, given the lead times for big projects, we have about run out of time—and just at a time when climate action needs to be big, quick, and sure to work the first time.
A better indicator of the climate peril is extreme weather. We are in a new danger zone from which we must escape.
The global drought and the 21st-century surges in extreme weather pose a much more immediate threat than another fractional degree rise in average surface temperature.
For five types, surges began during the surprise 2001-2013 pause in warming.
You may ask, “Isn’t that backwards?”
Climate challenges became much worse at a time when, according to 20th-century reasoning, many would have expected relief. That disconnect is just one reason why the 21st-century climate problem now needs a big re-think.
This is not your grandfather’s climate problem anymore. The climate problem has changed— but not the 1970’s mindset or the old treatment plan.
The Climate Problem now needs a focus on prompt climate relief. Debilitating disasters are already happening.
Given all of the bad news about climate in recent years, one might suppose that our better leaders (and high-visibility commentators) would be adopting a wartime sense of mission, that they would try to get the rest of us organized and focused on better solutions than emissions reduction.
But lowering the emissions rate is the only thing our leaders ever mention when talking about a treatment plan: “Double down on that carbon diet!” One would think that doing anything more was, well, optional.
That is a very 20th-century way of thinking about our current climate problems. It needs a reframing, perhaps along the lines of the medical mindset for preventing collapse. One important task for physicians is to regularly reevaluate the treatment plan and to keep looking for new actors coming on stage. They often alter the treatment plan. For climate, that rarely happens.
The 21st century arrived with an additional fast-moving threat, far more important than another fractional degree of global average surface overheating. There are seldom-seen actors now appearing frequently on the climate stage.
We are now in a new danger zone, if only because additional extreme weather events have boosted the chances of a one-two punch, a second hit before recovering from the first.
For example, the number of severe inland windstorms (tornado clusters, hailstorms, derechos—but omitting hurricanes) shifted in 2008 to thereafter average six times more than the 1980-2007 baseline. In recent years, the annual numbers have been nine times the old baseline.
That means that the future chances of a big one-two punch have soared. For severe U.S. windstorms in the baseline years, the chance of one happening in the current month was 10.4%. For another hit the following month, probability theorems say that the chance of a one-two punch in the US is about 1% — provided the two events had no causal connection with one another.
However, springtime droughts do tend to set up summer heat waves; as the surface dries out, the usual evaporative cooling is lost. A reduced snowpack and earlier melts are a similar setup for summer heat waves. By using random compound probabilities, I am ignoring any links—and likely understating the true threat. However, the one-two knockout punch scenario is quite bad enough without links.
After 2008, the monthly chance of a severe windstorm in the US went from 10% up to 63% and so the chance of a random one-two punch went from 1% up to 39%. Then for 2020 to 2022, the severe inland windstorms began occurring about once per month, somewhere in the US.
The big threat: some nearby double-hits would promote regional societal collapse. Even a few failed states could knock the supports out from under any big climate repair projects, such as creating diffuse shade and doing a CO2 cleanup. We should be planning for frequent one-two punches, yet we have not even bothered to underground power lines nor to gradually stockpile food. Do we have fatalists in charge?
Collapse is likely to kill people much sooner than heatwaves. We normally expect that the rest of the country will rescue the region hit—but when the collapse region is too large (say, a few Gulf Coast states), this self-insurance scheme fails because other states are in trouble themselves and focused on their own recovery during the shared economic collapse.
Between 2002 and 2010, there were four more shifts in other aspects of extreme weather: up triple-or-more were the number of billion-dollar episodes of severe inland floods and prolonged fire weather. Though less frequent, there were order-of-magnitude intensifications for both stalled hurricanes and mega heatwaves.
Forget the old “Black Swan” claims; despite hopes of a thousand years until the next mega, it only took seven years until a second mega heatwave occurred.
None of the Big Five have retreated like a storm surge during a high tide; it was surge and stick around. It seems that some aspects of climate shifted gears. There was that 1985 shift, after which land temperatures rose three times as fast as ocean temperatures. The 21st-century extreme weather surges seem to have transition times of only a few years.
We cannot go on with those 20th-century assumptions of gradual change that omit such fast-acting perils. “Time is of the essence,” as lawyers like to write into contracts.
Regularly revisit the diagnosis and treatment plan. That is what we teach medical students to do: to always look for new players and for better treatment combinations, to always be aware of how long it takes for lab results to come back, remember how quickly collapse can get started, and to ask if treatments need to be front-loaded using higher initial doses.
That is what I mean here by medical mindset. None of those has managed to become a feature of the big climate reports.
The 21st-century climate problem now requires a focus on preventing collapse. Physicians are currently the experts on preventing collapse; others can pick up some of the mindset by watching videos of an emergency medicine lecture series. [My favorite “real ER” is wondrium.com/medical-school-for-everyone-emergency-medicine.]
Despite innovative instances of best-practices in reducing emissions, the lower-tech parts of the world have not yet heard of them. Where was the money to help them? Our national “We are doing our part” reasoning is policy failure writ large, given that atmospheric mixing produces a global commons within several years.
To save ourselves, we must now counter the emissions of less advanced countries as they play catchup. You’d never guess that, not from what our leaders choose to talk about.
This is not your grandfather’s climate problem anymore.
Big projects have long lead times before any payoff; perhaps 5 years for high-rise buildings but, for the Alaska oil pipeline, it was 20 years. Decades may elapse between big climate repair efforts and the start of climate relief; yet we have not even begun planning and prototyping.
Even if nothing new had happened with climate or the growth in emissions rate, that long latency would still create urgency. The extreme weather surges have boosted urgency into emergency territory, where something that cannot wait jumps to the head of the line.
The lack of talk about a second front will make many influential people think that a low carbon “diet” is all that is required at this point, that anything expensive can be left on the back burner for another decade.
Current climate talk tends to focus on the millions of deaths likely from prolonged hot summers. But the associated crop failures spell trouble the following winter when the food supply runs out. Bread riots tend to promote civil wars over the remaining food. Preventing regional collapse (loss of fire-police-rescue services, closed banks and economic distress, waves of refugees, hungry soldiers with weapons, failed states) is seldom mentioned as the more urgent part of our 21st-century climate problem.
The emissions-reduction push did accelerate the arrival of LED lighting (saving 85% of the power needed by incandescent bulbs), as well as the electric vehicles which will soon reduce urban air pollution. Those are big success stories for their original economic and environmental motivations; relevance for climate was always icing on the cake. Their climate contributions, like other emission reductions, are now sadly underpowered because, thanks to deaf ears, the climate problem got much bigger.
What might work for prevention or efficiency does not necessarily work for reversing quickly out of a danger zone. Once a dental abscess has developed, for example, one cannot rely on consuming fewer sugary sodas. Cleaning out the abscess, before the bloodstream can spread the bacteria around, is often life-saving. Climate and ocean acidification now require a big cleanup before the ‘patient’ collapses.
Worse, the future is now arriving more quickly, so we are running out of maneuvering room. We have already been battered by extra extreme weather for 15-20 years.
Yet we seem stuck, with much of our serious climate talk remaining focused on lessening trouble in the far distant future, of looking out for grandchildren—but not very seriously. If we are to back out of the danger zone before civilization collapses, region by region, then shade and a cleanup have become essential. We must survive in the meantime for those end-of-the-century benefits to become relevant.
Why a ‘Second Front’?
Because we don’t want to replace the first front. Teaching it in school will remain a useful approach for the environment.
Because drawing down the overflowing CO2 reservoir requires a different approach than merely slowing down the input flow of CO2.
Because urgency is becoming emergency, due to the 21st-century extreme weather surges.
Because, while we currently have the organization and resources for big projects, by 2050 there will have been big expenses to relocate large populations to higher ground as sea level rise hits river deltas around the world.
Yet by 2040, there will have been many civil wars. They could doom any peaceful relocation. We are already seeing one big resource war aimed at gaining priority access to a neighbor’s agricultural output during a future crop failure back home. Judging from history, some resource wars will become genocides, if only from unequal sharing of the remaining food.
I see shade via stratospheric aerosols as valuable for an Arctic cloud cap in the summer, to stop the sea ice from melting. If scaled up to global, hot spots from uneven coverage will rearrange winds. Better to use L1 for global coverage.
By 2030, at our accelerating rate of battering, will there still be money for big climate projects such as producing a uniform shade to deflect a few percent of our sunlight? Sinking CO2? Or will disaster relief, wars to fight, and diminished tax receipts have made such big projects unthinkable?
Here in the 2020s, urgency has already become emergency, simply from the long lead times. (Yes, we have already wasted half a century of lead time.) Now we need climate interventions that are big enough, quick enough, and surefire. (There is unlikely to be time for a second try.)
We will need to try designing a half-dozen interventions, all at once. That is how a serious “Second Front” gets underway. We begin with various “Manhattan Projects” to design, prototype, and field test the potential interventions.
I have been painting a picture of where we are heading if we fail to successfully intervene. That should not be taken to imply that, within decades, debilitation and collapse are inevitable.
All you have been hearing is the first two parts of the physician’s three-part presentation to the patient, diagnosis and the prognosis if untreated. They are not the full conversation. The third part is the treatment plan. Shade. Cleanup. Building resilience. All as Manhattan Projects.
Surgeons and oncologists often have this conversation with a patient who has waited until stage 3 cancer develops before getting started on an intervention. Many such patients survive. Possible climate fixes are a topic unto itself, but it is clear that all of them will require design and field-testing on the scale of a Manhattan Project.
Let me summarize:
1. We need to retire the notion that going on a fossil fuel diet will fix our climate problem. (It is still a good idea for other goals.) If we were actually cleaning up CO2, then emissions reduction would speed up the process somewhat. However, we have yet to start a cleanup. We have our priorities backwards.
2. Many people think that “Zero Emissions” or “Net Zero” will make the accumulation go away. No.
3. After 1985, the land temperature rose three times faster than the ocean surface. Alter the temperature contrast over coastlines and that may change the winds and where they deliver rain—producing droughts here and floods there.
4. There indeed has been more global drought: the land area in drought doubled between 1983 and 2003.
5. Global drought and the 21st century surges in extreme weather pose a much more immediate threat than another fractional degree rise in average surface temperature.
There are now reasons why climate action needs to be big, quick, and sure to work the first time. We are in a new danger zone from which we must escape; collapse will kill faster than heat. Climate action now needs to focus on the short term via creating shade and removing CO2.
The climate crisis has been a lot to wrap our hearts, heads, and strategic policy around. But we now need big interventions before we miss even more exits on the Freeway to Hell.
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William H. Calvin, Ph.D., is a professor emeritus at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle. He is also the president of the CO2 Foundation and the author of seventeen books on brains, human evolution, and climate shifts. He wrote The Atlantic’s January 1998 cover story on “The great climate flip-flop,” the first major coverage of abrupt climate shifts addressing the role of “Gulf Stream” failures. Consult WilliamCalvin.org.
There is a color PDF available.
Additional Reading
Roger Angel (2006). Feasibility of cooling the Earth with a cloud of small spacecraft near the inner Lagrange point (L1). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 103(46), 17184–17189. doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0608163103
Calvin WH (2008), Global Fever: How to Treat Climate Change. London and Chicago: University of Chicago Press. faculty.washington.edu/wcalvin/bk14
T.M. Hall, J.P. Kossin (2019). Hurricane stalling along the North American coast and implications for rainfall. npj Clim Atmos Sci 2, 17. doi.org/10.1038/s41612-019-0074-8
Robine J.-M., et al. (2008), Death toll exceeded 70,000 in Europe during the summer of 2003. C. R. Biologies 331, doi.org/10.1016/j.crvi.2007.12.001
Trenberth, K. E. & Fasullo, J., (2012) Climate extremes and climate change: The Russian heat wave and other climate extremes of 2010. J. Geophys. Res. 117, D17103. doi.org/10.1007/s10584-012-0441-5
NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) (2019). U.S. Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters. www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions/. For a more global survey, see the annual extreme weather summaries produced by the reinsurance industry, e.g., thoughtleadership.aon.com.
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