How it will endBy Steve Kirsch Modern humans have roamed the earth for the past 120,000 years. If we continue to act as we have in the past and as we are acting now, the scientific consensus is that there is now more than a 5% chance that human beings could be virtually extinct in as little as 90 years from now. The reason you haven't heard about it though is because the press hasn't really connected the dots between 3 different highly respected scientific sources: IPCC consensus report, a paper that appeared in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (that was cited by Time Magazine), and a book, "Six Degrees" by Mark Lynas, that was brought to my attention by Bob Corell, a leading climate scientist who appeared on 60 Minutes in 2006. If you put the 3 sources together, you'll reach the same conclusion I did. Here are the details... Ostensibly, we will die due to the effects of global warming. By 2100, according to the IPCC consensus report (see Table SPM.3 on page 13 and footnote 5 on page 2 which explains the ranges in the table), there is a 5% chance that the average temperature of the planet will rise by more than 6.4ºC. That's in the report, clear as day, but nobody talks about it because only a few people understand exactly what that means to our planet. But one guy from the UK (who has hardly gotten any press in the US) Mark Lynas, has done the research on what this means. Lynas spent 3 years of his life poring over 10,000 scientific papers and found that, although it doesn't sound like a lot, a 6ºC temperature rise will pretty much wipe out just about every life form on the planet, us included. Although IPCC scientists had previously projected that there was only a 5% chance of more than a 6.4ºC warming by 2100, the assumptions on which those projections are based have already been exceeded, which is pointed out in this paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The paper points out that the assumptions in all 6 emission scenarios considered by the IPCC have already been exceeded. So that's why I am using the numbers from the A1FI scenario, which gave a 5% chance of exceeding 6.4ºC by 2100. If it doesn't happen by 2100, it will not be long after. I wrote a short web page "Why global warming should be every candidate's #1 priority" describing this in detail. The bottom line is this: unless we change our ways, there is more than a 5% chance of a mass human extinction in less than 100 years. I'm just telling you what the overwhelming scientific consensus is. Whether or not you choose to believe it is, of course, up to you. If you do disagree, what is the scientific basis for your disagreement? Do you know something the scientists don't? For some it will come much sooner. Australia will likely be mostly uninhabitable in 50 years from now (see Sydney 50 years to live Features The First Post). So what really will kill us? Greed, fear, short sightedness, and an inability to create a government that serves the public interest. Much as we may hate to admit it, our own government, which we empower to make decisions for us, is essentially no smarter than the frog in Gore's movie. Special interests, driven by short-term greed, control government decisions in America. Politicians, fearing they will be not be re-elected, pay attention to the people who are willing to spend big money to get their way. And despite all the awareness about global warming that has been generated to date, the public is still shortsighted and doesn't demand change. That lack of public outrage is why top staffers in the House complain that they can't pass even the simplest of measures to combat climate change, such as a bill to increase mileage standards for cars. It's likely that we are not outraged because we will not feel the full impact of the ecological catastrophe we are creating today for another 30 to 50 years due to the thermal inertia of the ocean. The climate changes we are seeing today are just the tip of the iceberg; they are from our emissions from more than 30 years ago. Our emissions today are much higher than 30 years ago. But most people don't know that. They look out the window and things look fine. It seems just too impossible to believe that we could all be dead in less than 100 years. So we choose to ignore what the scientists tell us. The most unequivocal and important scientific consensus in our lifetime, and we choose to ignore it. How smart is that? We are also too easily distracted by other seemingly more immediate issues such as terrorism, Iraq, healthcare and immigration to worry about things such as the survival of humanity. We think we can worry about that later. But we can't. By the time global warming has caused mass devastation, it will be way to late to do anything about it. The public can complain all they want...but it will be too late to make changes because the same "time delay" that has protected us for decades (the thermal inertia of the oceans) works the other way to make it impossible to reverse things quickly, even if we stopped all greenhouse gas emissions completely. Our climate is like a battleship: it's direction can not change quickly. Today, we are like mariners in a fog heading straight for disaster. By the time we can clearly see the iceberg ahead, it will be too late to turn the battleship to avoid hitting it. Think I'm kidding? This is starting to happen already in Australia. Australia is experiencing the worst drought on record with a lot of areas that haven't had decent rain for 7 years forcing them to have to import food to survive. Australian Prime Minister John Howard doesn't believe in global warming. Howard refused to meet with Gore when Gore came to Australia and he continues to believe that destroying the jobs of coal miners would be bad for the Australian economy. So what is his plan? He tells Australians to "pray for rain." I wish I were joking about this. I'm not. This brilliant political leadership of denying the science and not ratifying the Kyoto protocol is costing Australians $3.8B in lost investment opportunities alone. 76% of Australians think climate change is a major problem and they booted Howard out in recent elections. We're seeing the effect in America too. We are seeing a record-breaking drought in Georgia. Los Angeles normally gets 15 inches of rain per year, but there has only been 3.2 inches since July, making this the driest year on record. Florida is also experiencing the worst drought in its history, with Lake Okeechobee water levels shrinking to near-record lows, and the entire watershed of the Everglades drying out fast. In other parts of the US, extreme downpours are up 24 percent, according to an independent analysis by Environment America. The Pew Center on Global Climate Change has just issued a report Regional Impacts of climate change, four case studies including heatwaves in the midwest and wildfires in the west. Can we be saved? Sure, we still have the time and opportunity to save ourselves. A single billionaire or a single large foundation could choose to change that outcome. It wouldn't cost that much either, about $250 million dollars or so deployed judiciously to shift public opinion and make it safe for Presidential candidates to take the public interest positions that they should be taking. But that's just not going to happen due to a combination of ignorance and fear. For example, billionaires at companies like Google aren't going to get involved in publicly supporting a candidate for President who could fix these problems because it might upset some shareholders. The Gates Foundation isn't going to get involved because they are focused on their core mission, under the mistaken assumption that someone else (they have no idea who) is going to have the resources necessary to counter the special interests and save humanity from global warming. Warren Buffett could have saved the planet, but he chose to donate virtually everything to the Gates Foundation. I could go on. There is only one foundation I'm aware of, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, that has allocated substantial dollars ($100 million) specifically for global climate change. Unfortunately, those funds are limited to academic policy research rather than promoting change. Everyone else has a reason for inaction. Can you name just one prominent CEO in America who publicly echoes Lee Iacocca's frustration with the lack of leadership in America? I can't. So it's highly unlikely to expect any Good Samaritan with enough bucks to change things to also have a clear vision of how they can deploy their wealth to save the planet. Wealth and vision seem to be mutually exclusive. However, if we are to be saved, a smart visionary billionaire willing to put up enough dollars to offset the special interest dollars is the most likely savior, since all the other options have much lower probabilities. We can't expect our next President to save us. For example, all the top candidates for President are afraid of the special interests. They are not going to take a stand that might upset them because all of them want to maximize their chance of being elected. For example, why tick off the coal union (and lose votes) if you aren't clearly going to gain more votes than you lose? It's a simple calculation. That is why nobody running for President (other than Mike Gravel, who has no realistic chance of winning) has ever talked about replacing a single existing coal plant with a clean renewable plant. Who is going to make a $50 million donation so that a candidate can afford to take positions that are in the public interest, rather than having to cater to special interests to get elected? We can't expect the voters to save us. Even if we could pass a national initiative, it wouldn't help. The election of President every year is a good example. We can't even get that right because the public is too easily fooled. They focus on what the candidates say, instead of what they do. The evidence was obvious in the 2000 election, but nobody paid attention. In the current election, people are ignoring the behavioral evidence of who would make the best President, which clearly shows that the 3rd place candidate (John Edwards) would be far better for our country than the two Democratic front runners. Instead, the public chooses a candidate because they like what they say or because they think that candidate has a lot of "experience." We don't learn seem to learn from our mistakes either. We keep repeating them and electing the wrong person for President. People support Hillary because they "like her" or she has "experience" or because "it's time for a woman President." People support Obama because they think he will be a leader who will bring a fresh perspective and shake things up in Washington. Those are absolutely the wrong reasons to select a President. I wouldn't hire a guy for CEO of my company who hasn't clearly demonstrated the leadership skills required for the job. We should apply the same criteria for the CEO of America, namely, a President must exhibit the leadership ability and vision to solve our toughest problems. To make that determination, you must look at how they handled past situations; their behavior, not what they "say." When you do that, you find that Hillary can't pull together a health plan; after 15 years of trying she still has no plan. Her plan on global warming is silent on the most important pieces, and there are no specific greenhouse gas reduction goals. A leader who has no goals on the single most important issue that our civilization has ever faced? That's absurd. And sadly, she's the front runner! Obama is just as bad since if you read his legislation, you find out that he's such a "let's meet in the middle" kind of guy that nothing gets done. You may feel good, but at the end of the day, nothing has changed. Both Obama and Clinton were laggards on supporting global warming legislation in the Senate. Of the top 3 candidates, John Edwards is by far the better candidate as pointed out in this detailed analysis of the top 3 candidates. We can't expect Congress to save us. While there are many heroes in Congress (my favorite being Senator Barbara Boxer), there are simply not enough of them to make a difference. So collectively, Congress still acts like nothing has happened: we continue to provide hundreds of billions of dollars a year in subsidies to the oil and gas companies to make our problem worse and the House is unable to increase fuel economy by even 1 mile per gallon. Instead of spending $100 billion a year on global warming to save ourselves, Congress decides that it is better to spend it in Iraq (to delay an inevitable civil war between Iraqis), and they keep approving Bush's requests to continue funding even though the public is overwhelmingly against the war. Al Gore can help save the planet, but he can't do it alone. He's doing that by raising funds for climateprotect.org which will be running public awareness advertising. He's also withholding his endorsement for President until we have a candidate who is willing to take the actions required to save the planet. Global warming is virtually impossible to solve without support from the next President, so Gore is doing exactly the right thing by withholding an endorsement and I applaud him for doing that. The Clinton Global Initiative may one day save us. In 2007, now in its third year, there is a major emphasis shift toward climate and energy. It is now the largest subject area. Instead of a token plenary, it's all or part of every plenary. The amount of money channeled toward climate through CGI commitments seems to have gone from about $100 million to literally $10 billion+. The energy and the desperation on the issue are palpable. Unfortunately, all the money and effort toward attacking global warming continues to go toward technology and public policy solutions. Of the dozens of commitments on climate at CGI, not one of them was directed toward public awareness and education. We bemoan the lack of public support and conservation (the fastest, most profitable way of addressing climate) among consumers (2/3rds of our GNP) but all the focus at CGI is on stopping coal, renewable energy, and 'cap and trade'. The only exception was that Al Gore and Cathy Zoi were there from the Alliance for Climate Protection; Gore gave a rousing talk, and a $5M gift to the Alliance from the Buells was announced. The mayors of large cities may save us. San Jose recently committed to getting 100% of its power from clean renewable sources by 2022 and many other very aggressive goals. If all major cities follow San Jose's lead, that would be very helpful to showing others that it can be done. The media could help us save ourselves. But they'd have to go beyond the normal reporting of the news. Wouldn't it be great if when you heard the news, you'd also hear an accurate interpretation of "what this really means is..." rather than just X said this and Y disagreed. Fox News seems to do this quite well; they report the conservative slant of the news. What seems to be missing is the TV news network with the liberal slant. Maybe we'll get lucky and science will come to the rescue with a breakthrough before it is too late. For example, maybe we'll perfect a clean biofuel as superstar biologist Jay Keasling is doing, or be able to sequester CO2 emissions in a profitable way as Skyonic is doing. Or maybe Google will be successful in developing clean power technologies that are cheaper than coal. That would be huge, as coal plants are our worst nightmare. If we are going to save humanity from extinction, we had better be doing something about these 3 issues:
All of these trends are getting worse. None have been reversed at a global scale. We need action on all three. But right now, none of the candidates have the courage to even talk about serious solutions. In fact, on some issues, they won't even talk about the problem! For example, worldwide, coal plants used for power generation generate 40% of the greenhouse gas emissions. With a new coal fired power plant coming online somewhere in the world every three days, people will emit more carbon into the atmosphere in the next 20 years than they have in the entire history of humanity. There is no possible way to solve global warming without closing virtually all of these plants down, or securely sequestering the emissions. Sequestering is very hard to get right, and it's expensive. It's also risky, since we can't even figure out how to reliably prevent spills from oil tankers, gasoline stations, or how to safely store radioactive waste. This is undoubtedly why Jim Hansen, who is one of our top climate scientists, offers to sell the Brooklyn Bridge to anyone who is silly enough to believe in carbon sequestration. So we are left with shutting these plants down and replacing them with new, clean, renewable plants. Yet, can you name a single Presidential candidate who has even broached the topic of replacing just one existing coal plant? Nobody (except Gravel) will even talk about it. The best they can do is suggest that we shouldn't build any new coal plants. And only three candidates for President (Edwards, Richardson, and Dodd) are even willing to go that far (see LCV Candidate Chart)! I guess the candidates must think that "more than a 5% chance of human extinction in 90 years" is not statistically significant enough to take action now. So when will they take action? What's it going to take? When it is a 20% chance? A 40% chance? A 60% chance it will happen within 100 years? Unfortunately, the reality is that they will only begin to take action when the chance is so high that it is too late to change the outcome. That is fundamentally why our extinction is guaranteed. Ever heard a candidate for President talk about the fact that the world has way more people that the planet can support? Studies have shown that our planet can only sustainably support about 4 billion people. That number drops to 1.8 billion if they all adopt our standard of living, since wealthy nations like the US constitute 20 percent of the world's population, yet they use more than 70 percent of its resources. Earth has 6.5 billion people now, more than 3 times as many people as it should have. Every year, that number increases. It is expected to be 9.2 billion by 2050. But nobody running for any political office in America has the courage to talk about this problem and what the US should do about it. We are afraid to even talk about it! Exactly how do we think this problem will be solved? By magic? We cannot continue to withdraw from the piggy bank at a faster rate than the piggy bank can replenish itself. Is there anyone running for office who has the courage to tell Americans this inconvenient truth? Similarly, every major ecosystem on the planet is in decline, exacerbated by the population problem. Nobody talks about this problem either. Lester Brown does a great job of describing it in his wonderful book Plan B 2.0. Jared Diamond lays it all out in his book, Collapse. Diamond, Brown, George Monbiot, and others all point out that we have the technology to save ourselves, but simply lack the political will and leadership to do so. Terry Tamminen, energy advisor to California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, points out that even if humans aren't completely extinct within 100 years, it's highly likely that our standard of living will be nothing close to what it is today. Our future will more likely be reminiscent of the former inhabitants of Easter Island, who had a robust civilization of 20,000, but within a few generations of consumption and environmental destruction devolved into a few hundred souls living in caves and "surviving" through cannibalism. What's ironic is that our fear of confronting and solving these problems makes no sense. If we do what must be done, there will be an incredible upside along the way - new jobs, and the inspiration that comes from working together on something that is greater than ourselves. There could be a final product of a healthier, happier humanity, with a planet shared by diverse and amazing creatures, if only people are willing to make the compromises needed to live sustainably. It's too bad that nobody running for President [who has a chance of winning] has the courage to face up to our problems and the solutions that are required. John Edwards comes the closest by far, but even Edwards won't talk about shutting down a coal plant. Where have all the leaders gone? Lee Iacocca, who wrote a book with that title, doesn't have a good answer either. Heck, if we can't shut down a single coal plant in America, what makes us think we can solve global warming, overpopulation and eco-system decline? If we aren't even talking about these issues today, how do we expect to change? Do we think it is going to fix itself? Do we think that the planet is going to change the laws of physics and tell us it's now OK to pollute and exploit as much as we like without consequence? And if we can't shut down one coal plant in America or even talk about maybe shutting down just one small plant sometime in the near future, what do you think the chances of shutting down a single coal plant in China are? And if we can't do that, how do we expect to survive? Finally, even if we had the right Presidential leadership, that person would still need "ground support" and funding to get things done. Gore has a war chest of about $30 million right now, but it's not clear how it will be spent. The fossil fuel industry definitely has more than $30 million set to preserve their position. We are way behind where we need to be to counter the inevitable "job killer" ads that will be run by the fossil fuel industry. By this point we should have a war chest of $50-$100 million, firms hired to produce ads, and a tested effective message ready to run. We have none of that. One generous donor with the right vision could literally save the world, but no such donor has stepped forward. Who will it be? I honestly don't know the answers to those questions. So Q.E.D: we are doomed. Enjoy the next 90 years. They will be our last. |