Technical Aspect

Mechanics of GCC

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Script

I) Intro
a) To understand debate, helps to know the basics of how GW works.
b) I’m gonna simplify a lot. You can always do some Googling to get the more detailed stuff. Check out Grist’s “How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic.”
c) Don’t believe what I say—research it for yourself, but be very careful.
i) To not stop the first time you find evidence for what you want to believe—look for refutations to that.
ii) Use the credibility spectrum from “Risk Management” to evaluate sources.
II) Greenhouse Effect
a) Lottsa GHG.
b) Good thing!
III) Global Warming
a) Change GHG => equilibrium changes.
b) This has lots of effects, hence “GCC”
i) See video “Scare Tactics.”
c) Many GHG. Often hear objections:
i) “Methane is more powerful.”
ii) “Water is more plentiful.”
iii) CO2 is only the fifth most plentiful gas at .04% (there’s more argon!) (wow—that number has changed since I started teaching science!)
iv) So why the fuss about CO2?
(I) It’s such a tiny amount.
(II) It’s good for plants.
(III) Greenhouse effect is good.
(IV) Ever heard of too much of a good thing?
v) Cuz that’s the one we’re seriously monkeying with. How?
IV) The Carbon Cycle
a) Let’s take a quick look at the big picture, then go back and fill in.
b) Trees—cool trick (CO2 => C and O2).
c) Get buried and rearranged to fossil fuels (Lego T-Rex to hotrod).
i) Coal from plants, oil from ocean plankton.
d) Burn it (O2) to release energy and CO2. Back where it started!
e) Time scale is the killer.
i) What’s collected over 300,000,000 years.
ii) Releasing in about 200 years.
iii) That’s what all the fuss is about.
V) A Closer Look—Rates
a) Rates
i) We’ll talk Gt of carbon .
(I) (When we say “carbon” in the air, we mean the C in CO2.)
(II) Billions of tons.
ii) Tons of stuff going on. Rates of movement—Gt per year.
(I) Numbers from NASA—won’t add up cuzza rounding .
(II) Main ones to look at are:
(a) Oceans (in: 92, out: 90).
(b) Terrestrial biosphere (plants) (in: 121, out: 120).
(c) Sedimentation (in: 0.2).
(d) Anthropogenic sources (fossil fuels:6, deforestation:1, total:7).
(e) Volcanoes (negligible at 0.15).
(III) If you got swindled by GGWS, let’s correct some of what they said:
(a) Oceans give off way more than people. True, but net effect is a “carbon sink” at 2 Gt/yr.
(b) Plant and animals give off 150. My numbers say 120, but that’s close. Again, net effect is almost nothing.
(c) Volcanoes give off more than humans.
(d) First two are deliberate manipulations, and the last a simple lie.
(e) Don’t believe me! Simple Google complete discredits that movie and filmmaker.
(IV) Where’s the A-CO2 go?
(a) 2 into oceans.
(b) 3 remain in atmosphere.
(c) 2 into unknown “sink,” which could be a problem.
(V) Ways to get a sense of the scale.
(a) Time (300 million yrs vs 200 yrs).
(b) Rate (0.2 Gt/yr sedimentation vs 7 Gt/yr human emissions).
(c) and . . .
b) Amounts
i) 750 in atmosphere.
ii) 40,000 in ocean.
iii) 300 in oil (hard figure to come by—from UNEP graphic).
iv) 3000 in coal.
v) So is human 3 Gt/yr significant? Adds .4% to atmo per year. Why is that a concern?
c) Changes
i) CO2 levels in atmo. Atmo is .04% CO2 (less than 400 ppm).
(I) Been fairly stable for last several thousand years, all parts in balance.
(II) Vostok graph.
(a) On large time scale, quite variable.
(b) Note CO2 never been above 300 ppm (that’s our .03% in atmo) in 160,000 years.
(III) Keeling graph. When I first learned, it was 350. Today it’s ~380.
(IV) These are the now famous graphs. Watch AIT for more. Like Gore or not, the science has been vetted (Google it and evaluate your sources on the credibility spectrum).
VI) Misconceptions and Objections
a) Who are you and I to judge?
i) Are you a climatologist? Am I?
ii) Would you stake your future on my sole advice, even if I were?
iii) Defer to the professionals and supervise them.
iv) But as long as we’re talking, we can use this picture to see why some objections can be dismissed easily.
b) “Isn’t this still controversial?”
i) Not at all. Science has been essentially certain for a while that:
(I) GHG are increasing due to human activity.
(II) GHG trap radiation and act to warm the Earth.
(III) So really, the burden is on the skeptics to explain: how could we increase CO2 emissions and NOT have an effect?
c) “That graph (Vostok) is all over the place, so it’s natural variation, not human-caused.” “Climate changes all the time.” “We’re coming out of a cold cycle, so this is natural.”
i) Climate is complex, with many factors that can act as “forcings” from time to time (sun, orbital wobble, mainly).
ii) This time WE are the forcing, by short-circuiting the carbon cycle.
iii) No model or finding can explain the observed warming expect AGW.
d) “If we take action and climate change doesn’t happen, how will we know whether it was ever true in the first place?”
i) What we know is summed up in models, which make testable predictions.
ii) Bad news: according to models, it’s too late to avoid change. We’re now talking about mitigating how bad it will be.
iii) So, if we act and things turn out dandy, with NO change, we’ll know our models were wrong, and the skeptics can say “I told you so.”
e) “How arrogant to think that we can change the globe. We’re too small to have any effect.”
i) Tell that to a virus. Or a mosquito in your bedroom.
ii) Keeling graph—hard scientific data: we are significantly altering the composition of our atmosphere.
iii) Too small? It’s enough. Over 99% atmo is N2 & O2 neither of which is a GHG. A little GHG goes a long way.
(I) Remember that the next time someone makes a misleading claim about how little CO2 humans contribute to the atmo.
f) “The water vapor from HFC cars would just replace the CO2 as GHG.”
i) No, cuz it would come from atmo in first place. Where’s the CO2 from?
VII) More Bad News
a) Ocean may stop absorbing—may be masking the effect.
b) Missing sink may stop absorbing—may be masking the effect.
c) Now that you understand the basic mechanics, you’re set up to understand where the real gloom and doom scenarios come from. Watch the next video “Scare Tactics” for that cheery picture. But then don’t forget to finish up with “The Solution.”

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Scare Tactics

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This video is titled “Scare Tactics” and is part of the expansion pack accompanying the main video “How It All Ends.”

GONNA BE BAD

[With flashlight] Ever wonder where the horror stories of global climate change come from? In this video, boys and girls, we’ll see why the boogeyman is real, and not just a make-believe story your friends tell you to scare you. Bwuaah-haa-haa (cough, cough)

[Desk] When I first posted a version of the climate change decision grid in the Spring of 2007, a lot of the complaints I heard were along the lines that I had biased the grid by underplaying the negative consequences in the upper left box, and overplaying the negative consequences in the lower righthand box. In the video “How It All Ends: Risk Management,” I justified the consequences placed in the upper left box. Here, we’ll take a closer look at the lower right box. As you’ll recall, that’s the feasible worst-case scenario where we didn’t take action, but human-caused global climate change turned out to be true after all.

I was accused a lot of scare mongering. Which got me to thinking: is that always a bad thing? Can you imagine a scenario where maybe you’re not scared enough for your own good? I’m a science teacher, so I’m in a position of being able to understand a bit of where the pronouncements of “impending doom” come from. Now, most in the scientific world are very careful to NOT pronounce impending doom, not just because they don’t want to be accused of scaremongering, but because scientists have a trained hesitancy about being too confident. So the perception of doomsaying usually is created by the media’s reporting on what the scientists actually say.

As you’ll recall from the video “How It All Ends: The Nature of Science,” all science is explicitly uncertain, but that uncertainty is often dropped from the story when the media gets ahold of it. This is where the public has gotten its perception of “Why should we listen to the scientists this time, when they’re always predicting doom, and it never comes?” It’s because when the scientist says “I found an interesting preliminary result: it may be possible that average global temperatures might be falling. This merits further study,” the media—which is all about telling stories—runs with that and proclaims “Scientists warn of impending ice age! Glaciers may cover Florida!”

Which is why you personally, are at a huge advantage, having seen parts of the statements from AAAS and NAS that I shared in “Risk Management,” because you’ve had the opportunity to bypass the media and see for yourself what the scientists are saying. And, after viewing “Nature of Science,” you now have a better appreciation of how tentative science really is. So now you grasp how really remarkable those statements from AAAS and NAS are in their boldness. Science in its very nature is tentative, yet the two organizations that pretty much are the Science Establishment felt compelled to announce to the world: the globe is warming, we’re the ones doing it, it’s going to be bad, and we should do something about it quick. If you feel a little nervous because the normally sober fuddy-duddies seem decidedly alarmed—that’s probably a healthy reaction.

I should make this clear: the nasty details of catastrophic climate change I described in previous videos are the worst-case scenarios, so we don’t think at this point that they are likely to happen. But—as time goes on and our understanding gets better—they appear to be increasingly feasible. Eric Rignot, a NASA scientist who has measured a doubling in ice loss from Greenland over the past decade, recently said: “We see things today that five years ago would have seemed completely impossible, extravagant, exaggerated.” [National Geographic, June 2007]. Martin Parry, co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), told reporters this month, “We are all used to talking about these impacts coming in the lifetimes of our children and grandchildren. Now we know that it’s us.” [Washington Post, September 29, 2007]. Now remember, as a professional individuals, they’re near the bottom of our credibility spectrum that we described in the video “Risk Management.” But still, the sentiments give you pause.

Just today a student said to me “I’m tired of the predictions painting a worse and worse picture. I just want them to come out and say—oh, we were wrong. Everything’s going to be fine.” I told him he can get just such a pleasant bedtime story—just go the websites of the conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, the Hoover Institute. Cato actually published the book Climate of Fear: Why We Shouldn’t Worry About Global Warming, and CEI ran TV ads last year with the tagline “Carbon dioxide. They call it pollution. We call it life.”

But then, of course, he’d be obliged to compare them on the credibility spectrum with AAAS, NAS, USCAP, and Exxon. And then he’d probably get depressed again. But despair not! We can do something about this, which is what the video “How It All Ends: The Solution” is about. So be sure to not click away until you’ve seen that one. In the meantime, let’s employ some “scare tactics,” and take a look at where the boogeyman stories come from, to get a sense whether raising the alarm about abrupt climate change is closer to the story of Chicken Little or of Paul Revere. You gotta admit, they were both alarmists.

PENTAGON

In the video “Risk Management” I detailed how AAAS, NAS, and USCAP—as well as the national science academies of most of the rest of the world—have publicly called for action on climate change. But I didn’t a mention another stunning warning about climate change from a source high up on our credibility spectrum: a 2003 Pentagon study titled “An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security: Imagining the Unthinkable.” Commissioned by the Pentagon’s most respected big thinker, co-written by a former Shell Oil analyst, and reported on by Fortune magazine; it’s hardly the Sierra Club newsletter. You should definitely check it out yourself [Google “Pentagon climate change”]. It is an accessible yet terrifying read, full of war and chaos, as our military planners sketched out a worst-case, but plausible scenario:
“As famine, disease, and weather-related disasters strike due to the abrupt climate change, many countries’ needs will exceed their carrying capacity. This will create a sense of desperation, which is likely to lead to offensive aggression in order to reclaim balance.”

It cautions that, while the scenario it explores is not likely, “[i]t is quite plausible that within a decade the evidence of an imminent abrupt climate shift may become clear and reliable. . . The [sic] report explores how such an abrupt climate change scenario could potentially de-stabilize the geo-political environment, leading to skirmishes, battles, and even war due to resource constraints. . . . Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life.” Ewww, that last line is icky. In so many ways.

“Recent research. . . suggests that there is a possibility that this [currently observed] gradual global warming could lead to a relatively abrupt slowing of the ocean’s thermohaline conveyor, which could lead to harsher winter weather conditions, sharply reduced soil moisture, and more intense winds in certain regions that currently provide a significant fraction of the world’s food production. With inadequate preparation, the result could be a significant drop in the human carrying capacity of the Earth’s environment.”

Did you catch that? You may have nodded off for a second cuz these guys are even more verbose than I am, but that was essentially government-speak for “We’re all gonna die!!!!” Not quite, but roll the phrase “significant drop in the human carrying capacity of the Earth’s environment” around in your head a few times, and see how warm and fuzzy it makes you feel.

The report’s bottom line warning to the nation’s military planners is: “because of the potentially dire consequences, the risk of abrupt climate change, although uncertain and quite possibly small, should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a U.S. national security concern.”

If you go and you read this report about a national security concern, you’ll notice that the only mention it makes of terrorism—is as a consequence of abrupt climate change.

PEARCE

Pretty scary stuff. It makes a little more sense now when the author Fred Pearce relates his experience in researching his book With Speed and Violence: Why Scientists Fear Tipping Points in Climate Change. Remember, on our credibility spectrum, as a professional individual he falls near the bottom, and so we won’t take his personal analysis about the climate at face value. However, we certainly have no reason to question his personal experience. In the introduction he writes:

“Some environmental stories don’t add up. I’m an environmental journalist, and sometime the harder you look at a new scare story, the less scary it looks. The science is flaky, or someone has recklessly extrapolated from a small local event to create a global catastrophe. . . . But climate change is different. I have been on this beat for eighteen years now. The more I learn, the more I go and see for myself, and the more I question scientists, the more scared I get. . . Don’t take my word for it. Often in environmental science it is the young, idealistic researchers who become the impassioned advocates. Here I find it is the people who have been in the field the longest—the researchers with the best reputations for doing good science, and the professors with the best CVs and longest lists of published papers—who are the most fearful, often talking in the most dramatic language.”

ABRUPT CLIMATE CHANGE

So let’s take a look at some of the specific mechanics that have got top brass and top scientists both so nervous.

The details of all these worst-case scenarios are very complex, which is why in both the “Risk Management” and the “Nature of Science” videos I suggested leaving the interpretation of the evidence to the experts, and we stick to performing our supervisory duties by taking what the scientists say and deciding the course of action that seems to have the best expected value. But, now that you’ve watched “How It All Ends: Mechanics of Climate Change,” you are in a position of understanding a bit where some of the more outlandish-sounding predictions come from. So we’ll explore those here.

I think you’ll be disappointed to find that they are far more reasonable than you would hope. Because the picture ain’t pretty. As always, you shouldn’t take what I say at face value. Do some research for yourself, and remember to evaluate your sources. A lot of what I’ll share here can be found in a book called Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises, published by NAS, which—as a professional organization—is at the top of our credibility spectrum. You can actually read the whole book online if you google around a little.

In discussions about this with skeptics, I often feel frustrated with their insistence on immediate and certain consequences before they would acknowledge the need to do anything. Sometimes I find myself thinking “What do I have to do—say that global climate change is going to come to your house—personally—and eat your lunch!??” So here’s where we see why it’s not so outlandish that yes—global climate change may indeed eat your lunch.

The reason why this message may seem so different from what you’ve been used to hearing about climate change is that, just in the last few years, an entirely new topic in climate change has emerged. That is the idea of abrupt climate change. We used to think that the climate of the past changed gradually, and twenty years ago, when climate models first started suggesting that we could change the climate, all the discussion was about it happening in hundreds to thousands of years. But as the science improved (the data collection, computer modeling, and understanding of complex systems), the predicted time scale for the change just got shorter and shorter.

This is where most of the scary stuff comes from. And unfortunately, it’s not simply conjecture. Just in the last 5 or 10 years, we’ve come to see that the typical behavior for the climate seems to not be to change gradually, as we’d previously thought, but to hang in one state for a while, and then suddenly lurch to a new state, in a very short period of time, usually prompted by some sort of poke—some change in the conditions. And now the best, most recent science is suggesting that we may face the threat of the climate changing very abruptly—that means within decades. Perhaps even a single decade.

This general trend in the science of climate change—this trend of ever increasing severity of the predictions—is in itself frightening. Because in general, what science tells you today is more reliable than what it told you yesterday. In science, changing your mind is a good thing, because it means your understanding is getting better, closer to the physical truth. So it’s bad news for us that as time has gone on and the picture about climate change has gotten clearer, it has also gotten more grim. One more reason to be nervous.

So we no longer see the climate as something gradually shifting over millennia, but as something lurching from one extreme to the other, usually prompted by some sort of outside factor. Wally Broecker, the Columbia University climate researcher whose work is the foundation of carbon cycle science, summed it up vividly, saying: “We are getting a picture of the climate as an angry beast. And we are poking it with a stick.” This is one of the most authoritative climate dudes on the planet. Yikes.

ABRUPT=COMPLEX SYSTEM

In order to understand how something as huge as the global climate can change in a geological eyeblink, we need to first understand the nature of complex systems, sometimes known as non-linear dynamical systems, or in the popular parlance, “chaotic” systems.

I’ve pointed out elsewhere that “global warming” is not a great name for the phenomenon, not only because some places get colder, but because the change in temperature may not be the main thing we’ll notice. It’s how the rapid change in temperature destabilizes the climate, affecting precipitation (droughts and floods), wind events (storms, hurricanes and tornadoes), and ecosystems (forest fires, agriculture, and permafrost) that will really matter to us.

So how can such a small change so destabilize the global climate? Because the climate is a complex or “chaotic” system. So it’s worthwhile to look briefly at some of the features that define a complex system.

Unpredictability of specifics

One main feature is that the behavior of the system is extremely difficult to predict—hence the term chaos. General trends are easier to tease out than specific behaviors—sort of like it’s easier to say that about 50% of coin tosses will be heads, but you can’t predict the outcome of a single toss. It’s also why we can talk about probabilities of what the climate may do in 20 years, but we have trouble predicting whether it’s going to rain Tuesday or not.

Extreme sensitivity

Another distinguishing characteristic is what’s called “extreme sensitivity to initial conditions.” What that means is that tiny little differences can cascade into vastly different outcomes. Popularly known as “the butterfly effect,” it’s not just fanciful, but is easy to observe. Imagine two dried leaves floating on the surface of a swift river. One of them ends up hung up on a rock 10 yards downstream, while the other one finds its way to the ocean, even though they were placed side by side.

One objection you’ll often hear when talking about climate change is “how arrogant to think we can affect the planet. It’s only common sense that we’re too small to have an effect.” Tell that to a virus, or a mosquito in your bedroom when you’re trying to go to sleep. In a complex system—like the climate—very small differences can have huge effects. If you watched the video “Nature of Science,” you’ll know that common sense is easily fooled, and is no way to make a decision about a complex topic.

Here’s a slightly geeky example, but if you stick with me, it can be a pretty cool realization. Here’s a graph made by a fairly simple calculation, but the calculation is run again and again. It’s designed to do a basic population simulation of rabbits or wombats or javelinas or whatever, and it turns out to behave like a complex system. (Note that the population is not in whole numbers—you can take the vertical axis to be in millions if it makes you more comfortable.) Across the bottom we have “generations,” each one representing one turn of the crank on our simple calculation. You can see that the population goes up and down in a way that looks random, or chaotic. You couldn’t be expected to look at this and predict what the population of the next generation will be. Maybe you can describe some patterns, like it goes up, then down, but anything more specific soon fails.

But here’s where the really wild part of complex systems shows up. In this graph, the initial population differs from the one in this graph by just .0000002%. As you compare the population fluctuations between the two cases, you see that they track along nicely—identical as far as we can tell—which is what you would expect. But then, after 50 generations—BAM! The profiles diverge wildly, and we suddenly have two very different outcomes. Two completely different outcomes from initial conditions that were only as different as 5,000,000 is from 5,000,001! That’s crazy! That’s wild! That’s chaotic!

So next time you hear someone say “Oh, but we’re too small to make any difference to something as big as the global climate,” you just whip out your graphing calculator and show them this. Or. . . maybe not.

Feedback

The reason that complex systems behave with such extreme sensitivity is due to another hallmark of a complex system: feedback. This is where you have some process with an input and an output, say, like a microphone hooked up to a speaker. Here the input is the sound that goes into the microphone. The system transforms the input—in this case, amplifying it—and the speaker give the output—LOUD SOUND. In the population simulation we just talked about, the input is the number of live rabbits going into a breeding season, and the output is the number of live rabbits surviving at the end, and the system is all the things affecting bunny survival.

Feedback is when the output of the system is then used as the input for the next go-around—it is “fed back” into the system. As you’ve probably experienced, the results [DEMO feedback] can be painful sometimes.

The reason feedback leads to the extreme sensitivity we mentioned a minute ago, is because the process—breeding rabbits or an amp, or whatever—in one “turn of the crank” takes small differences and makes them slightly larger. These result are then “fed back” into the system for another go round, which makes the differences still larger, which are then made larger, which are then made larger, and you can see how you can quickly get a result which seems way out proportion to the original input.

“But that’s not feasible. That implies it would go forever, and run away!” Eventually, other factors kick in to stop the change, just like the speaker doesn’t continue to get louder forever. It bumps up against some limits [DEMO], so that the sound does level off, though that doesn’t mean it’s comfortable for us. [DEMO]

This is why—with global climate change—it’s not the temperature increase that really has scientists worried. Who wouldn’t like to be just a little warmer on a chilly day? The problem is that even a small change in temperature can get amplified by feedback mechanisms, so that we end up with a huge change further down the line—not necessarily in temperature, but in some other characteristic of the climate. Maybe in rainfall patterns, or storm frequency, or growing season.

Forcings and Tipping Points

The changes in the conditions which trigger such abrupt shifts in the climate are called “forcings.” In the case of our speaker demo, the forcing would be the small amount of ambient noise which gets the whole feedback cycle started.

In the past, the likely forcings which caused abrupt climate change were things like changes in the output of the sun, or the periodic wobble in the Earth’s axis, or a large random event—say, the breakup of a single ice dam releasing a huge lake all at once. The conditions at which a small tweak in the conditions causes a huge change is called a “threshold,” or in the popular press, a “tipping point.”

In the video “How It All Ends” I offered the analogy of flipping a light switch—small pushes result in small movements, until a tipping point is reached, when the same small movement that had done not much of anything suddenly results in a big change. Sort of leaning a canoe gradually over, until it suddenly tips. Or here [speaker DEMO], moving the mic a quarter of an inch at a time does nothing. A little movement, little to no change. The same little movement, still little to no change. But at some unexpected time, the same little movement which had unnoticeable effects before. . . . [screech] This is the part of complex systems that I think is really fascinating. Or really terrifying if I happen to be in the test tube.

It is the likely presence of tipping points in our climate which makes the game of climate change so dicey, or perhaps we should say Russian Roulette-y. The nerve-wracking part is, we’ve recently learned enough to have very strong suspicions that the Earth’s climate has tipping points, but because of the unpredictable nature of chaotic systems, we can’t know where they are! We can say that the farther and faster things change, the more likely we are to cross one. But tipping points really can only be identified from the other side. [Oops—guess I shoulda stopped there.] This is where that picture of the climate as “an angry beast” is coming from.

In fact, recent research seems to be showing that in the measurable past, there have only been two periods of climate stability, one of which humans grew up in. You might think “Ha! Change is inevitable! See, I told you it was a natural cycle!” Sure, on a geologic time scale it’s inevitable, like tens of thousands of years. But we have excellent evidence that CO2 is a forcing which may trigger another abrupt climate change sooner than it would have otherwise happened. So yes, it’s inevitable that the climate will change, probably drastically. But we seem to be making the difference between whether it happens 20,000 years from now, or in 2020. That’s the difference between it happening to you, and it happening to your great-great-great-great-great-great—well, you get the point. Plus, dying is inevitable, too. But you still dodge the bus, don’t you?

So how do we know it’s NOT just a freaky coincidence that the climate is changing observably at the same time we are putting observably more greenhouse gases into the air. How do we know it’s not natural, caused by the sun, or cosmic rays and clouds, or the Earth’s wobble? The simple answer is: no peer-reviewed study or model or graph has been able to reproduce the observed warming of the last 20 years without also including the “forcing” of anthropogenic—human-caused—carbon dioxide emissions. Go look it up yourself. There is no scientific explanation (that is, done by scientists, rather than armchair commentators) of what we observe now in the physical world that does not incorporate human “forcings.” When you hear that old saw about “It’s the sun, stupid,” go do some looking, and you’ll see that hypothesis is a contender for much of the 20th century data, but falls apart for the last 20 years. Plus, no one contends that the sun does not affect the climate. It is certainly one of the factors. But the picture seems to have become clear that it can’t explain the warming by itself. But then, what do I know—I’m not a scientist, and this stuff is really hard to understand. If you want competent analysis of a complex scientific issue, go ask the trained professionals who know how to properly interpret data. I think they’ve probably got a few of those over at AAAS or NAS. Maybe they’ve published something on the topic. Oh, that’s right. . .

The Pentagon Report I mentioned earlier specifically warns of such abrupt climate change:

“The research suggests that once temperature rises above some threshold, adverse weather conditions could develop relatively abruptly, with persistent changes in the atmospheric circulation causing drops in some regions of 5-10 degrees Fahrenheit in a single decade.”

Drops of 5-10 degrees?? In a single decade?? From global warming? Remember, That’s why global “climate change” is a better phrase. Better still climate destabilization, or climate chaos, or how about just global climate [“cl*st*rf*ck” is beeped out.]

So what exactly is the threshold temperature at which it all hits the fan? We don’t know. We can’t know, until we’ve hit it, cuz tipping points can only be identified from the other side. Nervous yet?

We know it’s possible, because it’s happened before.

12,000 years ago, long before SUVs, the globe warmed 9 degrees Fahrenheit in—guess how long. You got it—a decade!

“That’s what I’ve been saying!” some skeptics have told me. “The climate has always been changing. So why are we suddenly the bad guys?” Wait, that story is comforting to you? That because the climate has gone totally cattywompus in the past, therefore it can’t be us doing it now? What about the fact that it can lurch so far, so suddenly? Nine degrees in 10 years? Don’t you find that just little disturbing? And anyway, isn’t that reasoning sort of like socking your sister in the arm, and when she complains to mom, saying “You know, that arm has really been a problem for her in the past, huh? So clearly I’m not involved.”

Well I’m sorry to break it to you, but here’s the bad news: remember that idea of a “forcing?” In the past it was a change in solar activity or a wobble in the Earth’s orbit that provided the poke that sent the climate spinning off into a new state. Well this time, we are the forcing. We are the poke which threatens to send the climate lurching to a new state.

How can we—puny little us—do such a big thing? Well, remember, with a complex system, the poke—the “forcing”—doesn’t have to be big to have huge effects. It just needs to be in a ticklish spot to set off feedback mechanisms which then amplify the change, setting off more feedback mechanisms, and so on. And in this case, we are providing the forcing by digging up 300 million years worth of buried carbon in the form of oil and coal, and putting it into the air in the space of a couple hundred years.

This is why we should be talking more about “climate sensitivity” than “amount of warming.” And as far as I can tell, this is a indeed a shift that’s happening in the climate science community. I think it also is why the newer research seems to be making the IPCC’s predictions seem too conservative—perhaps way too conservative. Because newer research is showing that there are a number of possibly very significant climate feedback mechanisms which weren’t incorporated into the IPCC’s climate models. So it looks like history may end up judging the IPCC’s predictions as being way off base—but off base in the direction of too mild! That’s not good news.

One last feature of complex systems that seems a little contradictory is that of lag time. On the one hand you hear talk about abrupt change, but on the other hand, there can be significant lag time between cause and effect, simply because the system is so large, with so many interactions, that chains of cause-and-effect take a while to play out. What that means is you’ve got to look way ahead if you want to anticipate changes. This doesn’t contradict the characteristic of abrupt change, and in fact, can make a nasty combination.

As an analogy, a large ship is very easy to oversteer if you don’t know what you’re doing. Here’s why. You want to turn left, so you spin the wheel left a little bit. The ship doesn’t seem to turn—because it’s got a lot of momentum that’s hard to change—so you turn the wheel more. Still going straight, so you crank the wheel harder. Now, finally, the ship starts to turn a little bit, but this is the turning that results from you spinning the wheel the very first time, four spins ago. So now, when you stop spinning the wheel in response to the ship turning, there’s still a bunch of your spins “stacked up” that are going to be affecting the ship over the next few minutes. So you end up turning very sharply to the left—in a sense abruptly once it happens, though there was a long lag time after you first turned the wheel. And it’s the long lag time that allows you to stack up inputs, contributing to the magnitude of the abrupt change that eventually happens. With the ship, you panic and turn hard to the right, making the same mistake the other direction, but worse, and off you go in a wild zig-zag over the next few minutes, communicating to all salty hands that it’s a landlubber at the helm.

You know those big supertankers? The biggest ships on the planet? I haven’t talked to a pilot firsthand, but I’ve read they need to start their turns MILES AHEAD. As a physics teacher, I have a keen sense of inertia, and that picture sounds reasonable to me. So in a sense, our climate, with it’s complex interactions, lag time, and huge amounts of matter and energy, is like a huge ship, and we’re turning the wheel with our greenhouse gas emissions. The problem is, we’re NOT looking miles ahead. My fear is we won’t look up until it’s obvious to the most casual observer that we’re in trouble, and at that point, it may very well be too late to avert the shipwreck. Even if we can, it will take Herculean effort, because it takes a huge effort to make the same turn in a short amount of time that smaller efforts made earlier could have accomplished.

CLIMATE FEEDBACK MECHANISMS

So now we get to the meat of the boogeyman [ewww], where we can get a sense of why there are such drastic predictions resulting from a little bit of projected warming. What it basically comes down to is potential feedback mechanisms in the climate. We’ll take a brief look at a few just to get a flavor. There’s tons of info out there on this stuff if you want more.

[BOARD] Shiny white ice sheets reflect sunlight. When warming happens and you lose a little ice, then less sunlight is reflected, and more is absorbed by the underlying rock or water. This increases the temperature, which melts more ice, reflecting less sunlight, and so on.

[BOARD] Near the surface of the ocean, the phytoplankton—just like land plants—use photosynthesis to split CO2 from the air, keeping the carbon to build themselves, and spitting out the oxygen for us to breathe. We like them. They are good to us. They are actually responsible for about half of the globe’s photosynthesis, and to live they require the nutrients that are carried by cold ocean water upwelling from the depths. If the surface of the ocean warms up a little bit, that increases the thermal stratification in the ocean, leading to less upwelling of that cold, nutrient-rich water, which leads to less phytoplankton growing. Less phytoplankton means less CO2 is removed from the air, which traps more of the sun’s energy, warming the air and the ocean more, causing less upwelling, less phytoplankton, more CO2, and so on.

[BOARD] At the bottom of the ocean is trapped a huge amount of methane—a more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2—in the form of hydrates: kind of frozen together with water. Increase the water temp, and that melts the methane hydrate, which migrates to the atmosphere, where it does its greenhouse gas thing, warming the air, warming the ocean, melting more methane hydrates, and so on.

[BOARD] Warmer temperatures allow permafrost to thaw, which releases methane stored there, increasing temperatures, melting more permafrost, and so on.

[BOARD] Warmer temperatures allow frozen peat bogs to melt, allowing the peat to go back to the rotting it was doing before being frozen. Rotting peat releases both CO2 and methane, leading to higher temps, melting more peat bogs, and so on.

[BOARD] Carbon from the atmosphere ends up in the surface water of the ocean (both as dissolved CO2, and as part of the bodies of the plankton). The famous “ocean conveyor belt”— which not only keeps Europe nicely warm (Northern Europe is the same latitude as Siberia, but considerably more temperate)—carries the surface water down to the bottom of the ocean in the North Atlantic, effectively sequestering or “locking away” the carbon. Warmer temperatures melt more ice on land, increasing the flow of freshwater into the North Atlantic, slowing down the conveyor belt. If the ocean conveyor slows, carbon is sequestered more slowly, allowing more to build up in the atmosphere, increasing temperature, melting more ice, leading to more freshwater flowing into the North Atlantic, slowing the conveyor, and so on. This is part of why you’ll hear about Greenland—not just because it’s melting ice would raise sea levels, but because it’s perfectly positioned to seriously bollix up the ocean conveyer.

[DESK] Forests can give rise to the same feedback mechanism as the phytoplankton do. As the climate changes, a forest may find itself in a climate that stresses it out, increasing disease, allowing more insect attacks, and eventually you can have a significant part of the forest die—or perhaps the whole thing in extreme cases. So it stops taking as much CO2 out of the atmosphere, allowing temps to rise, leading to more dead trees, and so on. But it gets worse, because if you have an entire forest standing dead, it’s just a matter of time before a lightning strike sets off a massive wildfire, releasing back into the atmosphere all the carbon that used to make up the trees. So not only does the forest stop taking carbon out of the air, it can actually emit carbon back into the air that was handily sequestered.

If feedback mechanisms don’t have you scared enough yet for your own good, there’s also the concept of maskings. These are dynamics which keep the warming smaller less than it otherwise would be. That’s a good thing, in the short run. But the problem is, if the masking gets “used up” or stops working, then the effects of global warming will accelerate faster than expected. These maskings have been compared to coiled springs—they take up some of the shock now, but if used too much, when they let go, we get a nasty backlash.

[BOARD] Such maskings include the “global dimming” provided by aerosols—those are tiny little particles of stuff that our activities have put into the air—air pollution, sort of. Except in this role, they could be considered a positive thing by buying us some time. Essentially, they act to reflect some of the sun’s energy back out into space before it makes it to the ground, keeping us cooler. Kinda like atmospheric sunscreen. The irony is, as we pollute less in terms of traditional air pollution, the global dimming will probably decrease, allowing more sunlight in, increasing the warming. So the aerosols are probably “masking” some of the warming we’re causing currently, but could spring on us in the future.

[BOARD] Another masking effect comes from what are called carbon “sinks,” like the ocean, or forests. You may recall from the video “Mechanics of Climate Change” that we emit about 7 billion tons of carbon every year, but only about 3 billion tons of it hangs around in the atmosphere long enough to have a greenhouse effect. Two billion tons goes into the ocean as dissolved gas and bodies of little beasties. So the ocean acts as a sink, masking the warming that would otherwise be caused by those 2 billion tons of our yearly carbon emissions hanging out in the air, doing their greenhouse thang.

One problem is, in addition to its role in feedback cycles I mentioned a minute ago, the ocean probably has a finite capacity for absorbing carbon, but we don’t know what it is. It may be that one day, it sort of—well—stops absorbing. That would really suck. Because that would almost double the amount of our yearly carbon emissions that would accumulate in the air—from 3 billion tons to 5 billion tons—without us even emitting an ounce more. So suddenly we discover we need to cut our emissions even faster and more drastically than we thought. It might be like having the goalposts moved when we already thought we were giving it our all. Such is the curse of maskings. Friendly in the short run, but with a serious backlash if you abuse them.

And do you remember how we can’t account for that last 2 billion tons of our yearly carbon emissions? There must be a sink somewhere taking that stuff in, but since we have no idea even what it is, we can’t have any idea of how resilient it is, or how easily it could stop absorbing that carbon, leaving our full 7 billion tons a year to accumulate, instead of our current 3.

[DESK] So maybe now you see why there seems to be an increasing sentiment in the climate science community that—since the IPCC didn’t include a number of the feedback mechanisms now being studied—its predictions of climate change—often dismissed by skeptics as overblown and alarmist—are probably too optimistic.

DOOMSDAY SCENARIOS
It’s worth giving just a brief explanation for each of the specific doomsday scenarios that I mentioned in the video “Risk Management.”

Seas rising 20, 30 feet. This is due not just to the runoff from melting ice sheets and glaciers. A lot of it can be accounted for by the simple thermal expansion of seawater. Generally, when anything gets hot, it expands, and takes up more room. This is actually what accounts for most of the observed rise in sea levels so far. So you get a double-whammy: more water (from ice on land), and expanding the water that is already there.

Entire forests die and burn. I already mentioned how a changing climate can stress out the trees leading to increased disease and infestations. But here’s another way to look at it: but basically, as things warm up, regional climates will migrate, and the forests of northern California may find themselves in a Southern California climate. They don’t like that climate. That’s why they stuck to Northern California. So you can have entire forests die just as effectively as if you’d picked it up and plunked it down in the wrong spot on earth. These dead forests dry, and as soon as lightning strikes, you get the next catastrophe.

Widespread wildfires clear the land of the dead forests, but the forest doesn’t come back like it used to after fires, because all the seeds on the ground are for a different climate. I don’t have a reference for this one, so maybe I’m just making this part up. Someone let me know.

Massive floods alternate with killer droughts. This is a kind of funky one, because climate change can mean the same annual rainfall, which sounds like no big deal. Here again, relying on common sense can really do you disservice. Because if the rainfall is distributed differently, it can have a profound effect on our lives. For instance, here in the Pacific Northwest of the U.S., instead of getting our precipitation drizzled fairly evenly throughout the winter, we might get it mostly dumped in a month or two. Since it would be warmer, more of the precipitation than usual would be rain and less would be snow, not only causing large amounts of flooding when it fell, but reducing the accumulated snowpack. So when spring and summer roll around, there would be very little snowpack to feed the watersheds, and we end up with consistent droughts. Not only that, but a huge fraction of our electricity comes from hydropower—a carbon free source. So we would import more electricity from the coal-fired power plants elsewhere, which would increase carbon emissions. Hey—another feedback cycle! All despite the fact that on paper, the total annual rainfall stays the same as before.

The breadbaskets in the U.S. and Russia turn to dustbowls, leading to widespread famine. This was mentioned in the Pentagon report, due mainly to more arid soils, harsher winter conditions, and stronger winds.

Dreadful epidemics rage like wildfire. Milder winter conditions—wait, didn’t I just say harsher winter conditions? I can’t have it both ways, can I? Yes I can. Because what’s the name of the game? Global climate change—it’s all about the disruption caused when things like ecosystems and economies are set up for the regional climates they have now, and then abruptly find themselves in a different climate. Anyway, milder winter conditions (in some areas), fail to cause the die-offs of insect larvae that usually occur, so you get markedly increased insect populations, spreading over wider territories, carrying disease for people, animals, and crops. If you combine that with a public health care system already stressed by dealing with refugees from coastal areas, and the water treatment systems of major metropolitan areas being breached by rising seawater (remember how you-know-what always flows downhill? What happens when the bottom of the hill is raised up?), you can see where epidemics become feasible results of climate change.

Have you heard of colony collapse disorder? About 25% of the commercial honey bee hives in the U.S. have suddenly and mysteriously died. Global climate change can’t be blamed yet, but environmental stresses are thought to play a significant factor, perhaps by allowing more favorable conditions for parasites or fungi while at the same time lowering the bees’ immunity. This is the type of sudden, triggered, large-scale problem that sudden change in climate might bring about. If you think we’re just talking about honey, you should be aware that commercial hives are responsible for the pollination of something like one third of U.S. crop species. If you’re worried about “protecting the economy from harsh government regulation,” think about the economic impact of losing the commercial production of a third of the US crop species. “Protect the economy” indeed.

Storms like Katrina can become the norm. The debate is already active about how much to attribute recent changes in hurricanes seasons to climate change. But no climate scientist debates that it is plausible in the future.

And none of this sounds good for the economy, does it?

OBJECTIONS

Still, you’ll often hear objections like:

“Why get all wound up about the climate changing? Who’s to say what the right climate is?”

“Birds and bees build nests and homes out of raw materials in their environment, just like we do. How is this different? If there were no beavers, there wouldn’t be any beaver dams disrupting the natural course of a river—is that good or bad or just the way it is?”

“The climate has done fine before without us!”

“But it’s been warm in the past. Where’s the evidence that that’s bad? Sometimes I feel kinda chilly.”

My response to all these come down to: the climate is tremendously complex. Like I said a minute ago, it’s more accurate to think of “global warming” as “global climate change,” and even more descriptive to think of it as “global climate destabilization.” I’ve even heard it described as “global climate chaos.” Maybe that image is a little less comforting than “global warming.” Who’s to say a light tap on the chest is a bad thing? It’s not. Unless you’re balancing on top of a post. The issue is not the temperature; the issue is the stability of the climate. Every human settlement is set up for the regional climate it has now. How does spinning the wheel and swapping climate at random with another settlement sound to you? We’ve got a number of examples of ancient civilizations that disappeared suddenly, and abrupt climate change is one of the main suspects: the Anasazi, the Mayans, the Nabataeans.

There is no “right” climate. And there’s nothing morally wrong with a changing climate. The problem comes simply from the effects that a changing climate has on our standard of living. The problem is, we’re pretty much set up to deal with it like it is now. Here, it seems the greatest criterion for a “good” climate is predictability. Consistency. So that we don’t plant our crops and have them die. We also don’t tend to like extreme weather events, like storms, floods, and droughts. What the best science is now showing us is that a little change in the temp can radically change climate, making it both unpredictable, and violent. That’s the problem. So it’s really not about saving the planet. It’s about saving ourselves and our standard of living.

CHINA

One objection I hear a lot is: “Why should we [that is, America] change? China is a bigger emitter, and India’s right up there. Taking action would just hamstring us economically, and wouldn’t solve anything unless China and India are addressed.”

Yes, we should do everything we can to help and prompt China and India reduce their emissions—perhaps by developing the new energy technologies, and selling it to them at a profit! But aside from that, it doesn’t at all invalidate action on our part. Here’s why.

In a global system, bottom line, it’s the total emissions that matter. And when you’re playing a game that has a tipping point, where the movement from here to here is not big deal, but the same sized movement from here to here… [DEMO], there’s no way to assign who emitted that little bit that put us just over. Because you could point the finger at anybody and say: if you had emitted just this little bit less, then the total wouldn’t have crossed that tipping point, and we wouldn’t be hosed.

And you’d be totally correct to say that. You do recognize, of course, that they’ll be saying the same thing to you. And they’ll be equally correct. Everyone’s disappointed at the guy who missed what would have been the winning shot at the end of the basketball game, but the truth is, if that other guy hadn’t missed that lay-up in the second quarter, the game would have been won as well. And with carbon emissions, it’s all going on simultaneously, so it’s even more ridiculous to pick a scapegoat. So, no more of this “But what about China?” nonsense. It’s not even about the morality of “chipping in” or “doing our part” or “doing the right thing.” It’s about doing what’s in our self-interest. It’s about doing whatever we can to avoid crossing a hidden tipping point which might totally hose all of us. Plus with 5% of the world’s population, the US emits 25% of its greenhouse gases, so we really shouldn’t be stirring up the hunt for a scapegoat anyway.

CO2 LAGS

Speaking of the past, now is a good time to address a common objection from those who want to believe that humans aren’t changing the climate, so they go looking for evidence, and stop as soon as they find something that sounds like it supports their view. I’m not making fun of that—I just point it out as an example of how you actually get farther from the truth about the physical world—rather than closer to it—when you start from belief and look for evidence, rather than the other way around. Be sure to watch the video “Nature of Science” for ways to guard against this phenomenon of “confirmation bias.”

The objection is this: “In the ice core data of past climate changes, increases in atmospheric CO2 concentration actually happen 500 years after the temperature starts to go up. Those silly scientists have got it backwards! That’s proof that CO2 doesn’t cause warming—it’s the other way around!”

This is exactly why I suggest we leave the analysis of the evidence to the scientists, who know what they’re doing. Here’s the misinterpretation the skeptics are making about that data.

They are correct that the ice core record generally shows the CO2 concentrations lagging the temperature by several hundred years. The explanation is, the CO2 wasn’t the forcing of those changes in climate. Some other forcing that we’ve talked about started those periods of warming—like the sun, or the Earth’s orbital wobble. First off, logically that doesn’t prove that CO2 can’t or isn’t acting as the forcing this time. It’s the same as saying “My car has stopped many times before, but it’s never been for lack of gas. Therefore I must not be out of gas,” even though your gas gauge reads low.

And the second hole in that objection is scary in itself. You see, the warmer a liquid is, the less gas will stay dissolved in it. That’s why a glass of tap water left out overnight will have bubbles on the sides in the morning—when the water warms up to room temperature, it can’t hold all the air that had been dissolved in it when it was cold, so some of the air comes out as a gas, and sticks to the side.

Well, CO2, along with all other atmospheric gases, dissolves into the ocean. When something warms the ocean up a little bit—the sun, the Earth’s orbit, whatever—what happens to the amount of gas that gets to stay dissolved in the water? It gets less, which means some of that dissolved CO2 is now released into the atmosphere. And what does more CO2 in the atmosphere do? It traps more of the sun’s heat. Does this remind you of anything? Like, a feedback cycle?

The extra trapped heat warms the ocean more, releasing more CO2, which warms the globe and the ocean more, releasing more CO2, which warms the globe more, and so on. So CO2 did not trigger the periods of warming we observe in the ice record, but through this feedback loop, it probably turned out to be the dominant factor in the eventual magnitude of the changes. So, far from dismissing CO2 as a problem, this objection actually emphasizes the power of a little CO2.

And speaking of emphasizing, I want to use this misconception to emphasize that none of us should get too cocky about our ability to understand climate science—perhaps the most complex topic of study in all human history. Think back to the video “The Nature of Science” if you’ve watched that already. Do you remember how easily fooled your common sense was? There’s a reason that it takes a long time to get a Ph.D in these fields. As citizens, it is our role to essentially supervise those who are working for the greater good on our payroll, but we hired professionals for a reason. It’s because the world is complex, and they aren’t as easily wrong as we are. For instance, remember this feedback demo? What would you expect would happen if—once the feedback loop is activated—I move the mic closer? Louder, right, since there’s less room for the energy to dissipate, so the output and therefore the input has higher amplitude? [DEMO—it shuts off.] Wild huh? Totally unexpected. Guess why it does that? I don’t know. But I’m gonna have my Physics class play with it and see what they can figure out. But I recommend not trying this experiment at home with your own planet.

DIRE TIMES AHEAD?

The Pentagon report I mentioned earlier cautions: “With at least eight abrupt climate change events documented in the geological record, it seems that the questions to ask are: When will this happen? What will the impacts be? And, how can we best prepare for it? Rather than: Will this really happen?”

In his introduction to With Speed and Violence, author Fred Pearce quotes a climate scientist who said to him quietly: “If we are right, there are really dire times ahead.” If you’ll recall, my whole point of this video project is not to convince you to believe such predictions, but simply to ask the question: why risk it? Where is the value in ignoring such warnings from so many smart, experienced, credible people in the field?

Ten years ago, before I learned the details of global climate change, I lumped it in with all the other environmental causes. But once I learned the specific mechanics, evidence, and scope of the issue, things changed. Dramatically. I distinctly remember that afternoon, and the dreadful, dawning sense of “Oh, my God,” as the sheer scope and reach of the threat unfolded and fell together. I’d studied quite a bit of physics and chemistry by that point, and in that one afternoon, in that one chemistry lecture by that one professor, the puzzle pieces fell together with a crashing sense of awe. It transformed me.

As I said earlier, I live in the Pacific Northwest, and I love hiking in old-growth forests. I’m a literal tree-hugger. I dig touching this huge, living thing and imagining how it was there, in that exact same spot, already old, when the Declaration of Independence was signed, or when the pilgrims landed, or even before horses came to the continent. It’s just freaking amazing.

But now, when I see clear cuts, I think “Sweet! Carbon sequestration! Let’s get more trees planted, so we can cut them down too!” When a charity asks for money, I ask back “What will it do to reduce carbon emissions?” I’m even a booster for nuclear power now—the most reckless, irresponsible, short-sighted boondoggle ever—but it’s carbon free! I know I sound like a zealot, but this is entirely a pragmatic thing for me.

It reminds me of an account I read recently by a Washington insider. He was speaking about how the sentiment on Capitol Hill about global climate change was slowly changing, as lawmakers one by one each have their own individual “Holy shit” moment.

But there are so many problems, and only finite resources of time and money. Why start with climate change?

I had a professor of chemistry, oceanography, and atmospheric sciences—smart guy!—who put it this way: Paper or plastic? Doesn’t matter. Save the whales? Doesn’t matter! Toxic waste? Save social security? Pro-life or pro-choice? Doesn’t matter! If the worst of the potential consequences of global climate change come to pass, it will so dominate us as a species that every other conceivable issue will pale in comparison.

That is why climate change is not “just another” environmental issue. This is not about whether you love mother Earth or care for the whales or enjoy the idea of old growth forests or the value of wild lands. This is the height of pragmatism. This is about preserving our standard of living in the face of potentially drastic changes that we ourselves have caused.

Just why is climate change such a dominant issue? Look out your window. Climate is everywhere, everywhen. In the past, when we mucked someplace up, we could always move “to greener pastures.” But when it’s global, there’s nowhere to run to. Nowhere to hide.

Part of what makes this all terrifying is not just the possibility of abrupt climate change, but how it’s a complete mismatch for our threat-survival system. Psychologist Daniel Gilbert wrote an excellent column in 2006 titled “If Only Gay Sex Caused Global Warming,” where his basic point was, we evolved (if you believe in that) to react to what is immediately threatening—call it the Saber Tooth Tiger reflex—and that’s worked great for us so far as a species. But now we find that we are threatened by something that instead is abstract and in the future. And we’re just not wired to watch out for stuff like that. I guess that’s why we’re sitting in column B of our grid—”little to no significant action”—which is a frightening place to be when you realize the what the stakes are, and that the odds seem to be heavily in favor of human-caused global climate change turning out to be true rather than false. I don’t know about you, but that gets me really agitated.

It’s sort of like changing lanes on the highway to miss an unexpected obstruction in your lane. If you’re vigilant and on your game, you see it far enough ahead that you can signal, look in your mirror, check your blind spot, and smoothly change lanes to avoid it. But if you’re careless or distracted, so that you don’t see it until you’re almost on top of it, all you can do is yank the wheel and hope no one is in the lane next to you.

And that’s the problem. As a species, we’re pretty much ADD. As a group, we’re not looking down the road; we’re just trying to get through the next couple of minutes.

And to me, that’s the most terrifying part of all this. We’re confident that we get out of any pickle we need to, because our brilliant innovations, improvisations, and reactions have always fit the bill before. Maybe that’s why the alarm bells haven’t gone off. Our unconscious bias has been formed by our past success, so we can’t imagine failing so spectacularly. But this time, it seems it will probably take something new for us to succeed: we will have to overcome our basic human nature of being reactive, instead of proactive. That’s a heck of a challenge.

Years ago I learned a lesson about looking ahead that has stuck with me, and I’d like to share it here. I grew up on a farm—a nursery, technically. My dad grew ornamental plants in the ground, and sometimes it was my job to mow the grassy roads in between the planting beds. You’d want to get as close to the plants as possible, without hitting them, to minimize the amount of hoeing you’d have to do by hand later. The problem was, the plants were both delicate, and expensive. So you’d have to really concentrate. Especially cuz you were driving a medium-sized tractor fairly fast and the big mower hanging off the back would swing out the opposite way when you turned.

So if I was trying to nestle right into the row of plants to my right, I’d have to be extremely careful of turning the wheel to the left, cuz that would swing the mower to the right, towards the plants. So of course what happens is by shying away from turning to the left, you’d have a bias for drifting right, which would require turning the wheel to the left to correct, but you wouldn’t want to do that cuz it would swing the mower towards the plants, so you’d hesitate, drifting farther to the right, requiring a bigger turn left which you’d want to do even less.

The upshot was, if you weren’t totally on top of it, making tiny little corrections immediately, anticipating what was coming up ahead, you would quickly find yourself in a nasty feedback spiral and before you knew it you’d mowed down a couple hundred dollars worth of plants.

I learned my lesson fast. Thankfully, all it cost was some money.

Let’s not require such a lesson for ourselves when the cost might be our climate, our standard of living, our future.

It’s going to take a lot of us giving our best effort to be as thoughtful, self-critical, methodical, and generous as we ever will be in our lives. But I think we can do it. We’ve never encountered a problem like this before, where the lag time is large, the tipping points hidden, and the outcome global. This time, the problem is like none other, so the solution must be like none other.

It’s time for the best in us to come out.

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The Solution

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Script

This video is titled “The Solution” and is part of the expansion pack accompanying the original video “How It All Ends.”

[BOARD, OUTLINE] In this video I’ll share three different categories of solutions for combating anthropogenic global climate change. First, technical solutions: what, physically, will address climate change. Second, policy solutions: what do we as a society do to implement the technical solutions. And finally, personal solutions: what do you—the viewer—do differently tomorrow than you did today?

You may have already watched “The Mechanics of Global Climate Change” and “Scare Tactics,” in which case, you probably see that the technical solution is screamingly simple. If the problem is that we are emitting too much CO2, then the solution is: stop doing that! If you have a headache from banging your head against the wall, the simplest solution is to stop banging your head.

I hope it’s clear what the answer is to these objections that I often hear: “If man has changed the climate, then what is it SUPPOSED to be now? What’s the right climate? Until we have a clue what the norm is, how do we know how much we need to adjust what we’re doing? What if taking actions makes it worse? Or we overshoot and cause an ice age?”

It’s not like there’s a giant thermostat hidden somewhere whose dial we get to turn, if we could only decide what setting it’s supposed to be at. We’re not talking climate engineering—no giant space mirrors. This is a common objection, so I want to be clear: “taking action” on climate change means stopping the disturbance we are currently causing. It means stopping rocking the boat.

A slightly less charitable but certainly more vivid analogy would be: stop thrashing like a monkey at the controls of a nuclear power plant! That’s the action we’re talking about—stopping the thrashing. Now, we’re not “the bad guy” for being the thrashing monkey. We didn’t realize we were in a control room. We were just doing our thing. We’re only now starting to see that there are some buttons and levers that maybe we’ve been bumping.

So now that we know better, the wise thing to do is to get a bit more cautious and little less careless in our dancing around. To realize that there may be consequences we hadn’t thought of, and won’t like, if we continue doing things the way we have. It’s gonna take some will power, because you’ve gotta admit, continuing doing things like we always have is certainly the most convenient thing in the short run. Which is maybe part of why there’s still so much resistance despite the very clear statements from the very qualified AAAS and NAS.

Because the hitch is: we really like doing the things that emit all that CO2—at least in the industrialized countries, it’s the carbon-emitting activities that largely make our lives so darn comfortable. And by activities, I don’t just mean going muddin’ on the weekend in your lifted pickup. I essentially mean the modern lifestyle, because a huge chunk of our electricity comes from burning fossil fuels, which—as you’ll recall—is the exact opposite of the process that put that carbon in the ground in the first place over the last 300 million years.

[BOARD, OUTLINE] So on a conceptual level, the technical solution is simple: stop moving so much bloody carbon from the ground into the air. But, as you might expect, the implementation involves some complexity, which comes from several factors.

The first is the simply huge energy requirements created by our large population using current technology to maintain such a high standard of living.

The second is: oil and coal (made mostly of carbon) are a very easy source of energy. It’s pretty much just lying around, chock full of energy. We just dig it up, and—since the huge amounts of energy are stored in a very stable form—we can safely haul it to wherever you need the energy.

Once we’re there, to extract the energy, we let the carbon combine with oxygen from the atmosphere, releasing heat—that is, we burn it—and we use the heat to do something useful for us, like spin a turbine, or push a piston. At the end of that we’re left with the waste product of the reaction—CO2. But it’s not poisonous, and it’s never been a problem, so we just vent it into the air, and let it drift away. In fact the Competitive Enterprise Institute helpfully ran ads just last year reminding us that CO2 is necessary for all plant life. “Carbon Dioxide,” went the tag line. “They call it pollution. We call it life.” So we dump the waste product into the air, and it feeds the plants. No big deal.

Well, it didn’t used to be a big deal. But we’ve been doing this so much, that the waste bin we’ve been using—the atmosphere—is starting to “fill up.” See this bag? It’s a five pound sack of coal—almost pure carbon, dug up from the ground where it’s been stored for some hundreds of millions of years. What’s the significance of the 5 pound sack? This is the amount of carbon that you put in the air with every gallon of gasoline you burn. If you’re in a Hummer, that’ll get you maybe 12 miles, and if you’re in a Prius, that’ll get you 4 times as far. Of course, the Hummer will totally stomp the Prius flat in the shopping mall parking lot, but we’re not talking about that.

So the problem is not that we’re running out of this stuff. We will in a little bit, but not yet. The problem is that the waste basket is starting to back up. Not in the sense that we can’t fit any more CO2 in, but in the sense that it’s now making a difference in the way the atmosphere—and therefore the weather patterns—behaves.

[BOARD, OUTLINE] So, although the technical solution is simple—reduce carbon emissions—the challenge is how do we do that without reducing the activities that we like so much?

There are three basic strategies in our category of technical solutions: get the energy from a process that doesn’t put CO2 into the atmosphere, reduce energy demand, and do things that actually take carbon back out of the atmosphere.

First, lets look at changing where we get our energy. We currently get almost all of our energy from fossil fuels—coal, oil, and natural gas. That’s where the whole problem is, because each of those is made mostly of carbon. So the first strategy is to find different sources for our energy. This is what’s meant when you hear the term “renewable energies” or “alternative energies.” Basically, those both refer to anything that’s not a fossil fuel, because we want to get our energy from non-carbon-based sources. Get it from your sun, or your wind, or uranium. [Snicker] This can be fun and exciting stuff—cars that “run on water,” cool stuff like that!

Hydroelectric power—zero carbon emissions. Wind farms—zero carbon. Nuclear power—zero carbon. (There’s the little problem of what to do with the waste, but that now pales in comparison to the problem of global climate destabilization.) Electric cars—neck snapping acceleration (so I’ve read) and zero carbon if the electricity comes from renewables. These are mature technologies. They just need a leg up.

We can use biodiesel and ethanol, both of which come from plants we grow. Use them in their own production, and they’re zero carbon! Think of them as stored solar energy. Really, the energy is from the same source as fossil fuels, just fresher. They’re composed of carbon taken from the air and stitched together with energy from the sun. They still turn back into CO2 when you burn them, so technically they emit CO2. But the carbon they emit was already in the air a couple of years before, whereas the carbon that fossil fuels emit was last in the air hundreds of millions of years ago. So yes, biodiesel and ethanol emit carbon when you burn them, but just a year before that, they took that exact same amount of carbon out of the air, so the net carbon emissions of biodiesel and ethanol are zero. It’s a really slick trick.

Hydrogen fuel cells are a totally cool technology that’s just getting started. The core part is often just a membrane. Put hydrogen from your tank on one side of the membrane, and oxygen from the air on the other side, and presto—the thing produces electricity with no moving parts! And guess what the waste product is? What might you get when you combine hydrogen—H—with oxygen—O. H2O! Water! So when you run your hydrogen fuel cell car, not only is there no noise, but the only thing coming out your tailpipe is water! It’s actually more pure than what comes out your tap! You could drink it! Just pipe it right through the window into your cupholder! Don’t try that with your gasoline car.

Of course there are drawbacks to each those energy sources. That’s why they’re called “alternatives” instead of “perfects.” But before someone tries to kill your buzz about the cool stuff ahead—like pointing out that wind turbines kill birds, and biodiesel isn’t really carbon-neutral because we still use fossil fuels in its production—remember that we’re quickly seeing that the alternative to renewable energies—that is, business as usual, moving carbon from underground into the atmosphere—is likely to have a much, much worse downside than all of these “renewable energies” combined. So delaying action because the alternatives aren’t perfect, is just a case of not thinking things through.

[BOARD, OUTLINE] Now as we look at the second strategy in our technical solutions, remember, the problem is too much CO2, and the basic solution is to reduce and eventually stop the process of moving carbon in large amounts from the ground to the air.

“Great. Back to the Dark Ages,” you say.

Actually, no. That’s only if you’re not creative. We just need to change our thinking. For the last 15 years, this next point from Hal Harvey has stuck in my mind, because it changed how I think about problems:

[SCREEN] “More than a decade ago, Amory Lovins and John Holdren and a few others asked this question in the energy field: what do people want? [Their] response was that people do not want barrels of oil or kilowatt-hours of electricity or cubic meters of gas; instead they want heat, light, drivepower, mobility. That simple insight more than doubled the number of potential solutions to the energy crisis by allowing for demand-side answers. That insight, borne of a simple question, created an energy revolution.” [Hal Harvey, May 22, 1992 Commencement Address, Energy Resources Group, UC Berkeley.]

[BOARD, OUTLINE] So the second technical strategy is to reduce carbon emissions by reducing energy demand. There are huge gains to be made quite easily here: compact fluorescent light bulbs, better fuel efficiency standards for cars and trucks, weatherizing buildings, Energy Star appliances. These are all on the shelf right now.

Oh, we’ll have to work at it, but a lot of it has the potential to end up paying for itself through the savings in energy purchased! Basically, it’s just being smarter—more efficient—with the energy we use.

For example, you probably didn’t realize that for every dollar’s worth of electricity you buy for your light bulb, you immediately throw out 80 cents, because it turns directly into heat, instead of light. If you think government taxes are bad, this heat tax is even worse, because it’s 80%, and no one even provides any services with it.

You just throw that money, literally, out the window. In fact if you’re not in a cold climate, it’s worse than just throwing it out the window. You’d do well to just throw it out the window. That would be smarter than what you’re doing right now. Because when the heat from that 80% “tax” you pay on your light bulbs doesn’t go out the window, it stays in your house and warms it up. So if it’s a nice day out, you then turn on your AC, spending even more money. All because you were using what William McDonough calls “fairly efficient heaters which happen to give off some light.” In terms of the thermodynamics, using one of these is like walking into your dark kitchen at night and turning on your electric burners to see by. These things are ridiculous!

So, thinking like Hal Harvey, can we get the same function, without throwing away all that energy? You bet! Compact fluorescent bulbs are more expensive to buy, but end up saving you money by using less electricity for the same light, and they’re getting better all the time.

How about that old saw: drive less. Or get a car with a higher gas mileage. If your manhood can’t stand small cars, drive a biodiesel. A cool trick—the mileage doesn’t really matter since it’s close to carbon neutral. In fact, if you plant some grass on the roof and bury the clippings, you could be carbon negative! You don’t even have to stop your weekend muddin’—just do it in a diesel truck! I told my students they should buy me a diesel Hummer 3, and by running biodiesel in it, I’d be better for climate change than the math teacher’s Prius. Since then I’ve learned Hummers don’t come in diesels. And no one’s started a collection yet. But a guy can dream!

There’s tons of innovations going on right now in all sorts of products to bring you the same functionality, but at greatly improved energy efficiency. It’s pretty slick—save the planet while saving money.

[BOARD, OUTLINE] The third basic technical strategy for reducing the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere really has nothing to do with emissions. It is simply to actively pull carbon out of the air, and put it somewhere else. This is often called carbon sequestration [on board]—just like when a jury in a high profile trial gets sequestered—put away. Except the carbon doesn’t get a book deal afterwards.

When my students see for themselves that the problem is too much CO2 in the atmosphere—”I see-oh-too much CO2” as one student put it—invariably they start asking if there is something we can put into the air to neutralize it somehow. They want things that we can do to get the CO2 out of the air. Well there’s no way to neutralize it as such, but there are some ideas about complicated systems that you can attach to your coal-fired power plant, to try to capture the CO2 coming out and inject it back underground somehow. Perhaps those will be part of the solution.

But I tell my students that we already have a mature technology that will capture CO2 from the air and turn it into a solid form, which we can then dispose of. This device is already available, and it’s remarkably durable and low-maintenance, almost to the point of being self-repairing in a limited sense. In fact one of the most ingenious parts of it is it’s also pretty close to being self-assembling, so once you have the basic kit, you can just do a simple installation and go away, while it does the rest! Because of this, it starts out small so it’s easy to transport, and as it captures the CO2, it stores it on-site in handy packages that are then easy to haul away.

You’d think these would be really expensive, but amazingly, they’re so cheap that if one does break, you don’t even try to fix it, you just install a new one. You don’t have to hook them up to the electrical grid—they’re solar powered, so you can even put them in remote places. Their emissions are benign, even helpful. (Maybe the CEI could do an ad about that.) And, they’re not an eyesore! In fact, many people actually like to look at them and hang around in their shade. And the waste that they produce—the solid form of the carbon—actually can be useful as a building material.

Have you guessed what the device is? A tree. And all you need to get one of your own is this little packet of instructions on how to make one out of air and water, stitched together by solar energy. Install it in the ground, and it almost immediately starts to assemble itself, pulling CO2 out of the air, stripping off the carbon to reassemble into wood, leaves, and fruit, and spitting out the waste oxygen for us to breathe. A pretty cool trick, and these will definitely be part of the solution.

[BOARD, OUTLINE] Those are just some of the technical solutions. But how do we make those happen? That’s where policies come in. Because the problem is so big, the only way we can make enough happen on a large enough scale soon enough is by national policies.

Some policies are pretty straightforward, like providing significant funding for research into renewable energy technologies , and tax breaks for using such technologies. This is necessary as a government policy because renewables cannot compete economically yet with fossil fuels, because all of our infrastructure is set up for fossil fuels. So we need an institutional push to help renewable energy sources mature enough that they can compete with the relatively and easy and available fossil fuels. That is exactly why we have governments, to fill in where the free market can’t accomplish what needs to happen. The free market won’t make renewables competitive until the fossil fuels become scarce, which looks like it probably won’t happen until well after the climate undergoes some irreversible (at least on our time scale) changes.

Other obvious policies include higher fuel efficiency standards for vehicles, and subsidies for creating the infrastructure for the manufacture, distribution, and storage of hydrogen and biofuels.

A policy called cap-and-trade is already in place in much of the rest of the world, and although its implementation certainly has some wrinkles to be worked out, it’s pretty clever. Done well, it can accomplish the goal of making sure that total emissions (which—after all—is the bottom line we care about) remain below a specified level, yet individual emitters are allowed flexibility to make changes and adapt. It also links financial economy with carbon emissions, so that companies who do better at reducing their emissions are financially rewarded at the expense of companies that do poorly. I’m no economist, but it sure seems to harness some of the best dynamics of markets in order to accomplish a greater good that no single company—or the market itself—could ever afford to pursue on its own.

But again, as with the science, there are people way more qualified than you or me to figure out what would be the most effective policies to accomplish our objective of reducing carbon emissions as quickly as possible.

[BOARD, OUTLINE] So what do you personally do about this? Well, that depends on several things, mostly how motivated you are, balanced by the other demands your life places on you. If an issue seems small to you, then you maybe do something about it occasionally. But if your house is about to get bulldozed, then you drop absolutely everything to go all out to fight it. It’s up to you to make that evaluation.

“But just tell me how much needs to get done? How much is enough?” Yeah, who wants to do more than they have to, right? So let’s figure out exactly how much needs to get done, and then just do that. Give us the goal—what’s it going to take to fix this?

The problem is, we don’t know. Remember, there are no certainties in this game, only probabilities. And we won’t know where a tipping point actually is until we cross it. But the most recent climate science seems to indicate that it is probably already too late to avoid significant climate change. Sorry. However, the speed and extent of our actions will affect how quickly that change comes, and how severe it will be. So we can’t afford to be fatalistic, because that would only make it worse.

[At grid] As a general rule, the greater the action we take—that is, the more demanding the government policies and the greater the personal sacrifices—the more we decrease the probability of this down here, and increase the probability of this up here. So how much strikes the right balance? That’s the next discussion we need to have, and it’ll be messy, because it will involve all sorts of values—like how risk averse you are, how much weight you place on the welfare of others, etc.

I just hope that this time, with this discussion, we’ll listen to the scientists a little more, and guys like the Heritage Foundation and the Competitive Enterprise Institute a little less. As you recall, the Heritage Foundation was the one who argued against the Kyoto Protocol in 1998 because the resulting drastic economic harm could result in gas costing as much as $1.91 a gallon by 2010. And CEI was the one with the “Carbon dioxide. They call it pollution. We call it life.” I’m getting the feeling these guys don’t have the best interests of the whole at heart.

What you personally do, depends on how motivated your research makes you. I’ve got my opinions, but I hope I’ve made it clear through this whole thing that I think you should form your own, with conscientious, self-critical effort. And I want to avoid a repeat of President Carter’s famous sweater speech, where he asked for more sacrifice than people were willing to make, and thus his call to action was dismissed, with the net effect of his cause losing ground instead of gaining it.

So how about I suggest a range of personal actions, from less demanding to more-demanding. And once you’ve mulled it over and decided how much the threat of global climate change balances against the other demands in your life, you can pick something from the menu.

With all of these personal actions, the goal is nothing less than to change our culture, so that a policy maker can’t turn around without a constituent asking “What are we—you—going to do about global climate change?” Because the only way to really buy ticket A is with policy changes.

That’s because the actions required to address this global problem are too big to be borne by the few. The demands must be spread out amongst everybody, so that we can make significant changes in our total carbon emissions without asking such great sacrifices from individuals that people will refuse to support the effort. In today’s media-saturated world, policy makers will not get too far out ahead of their constituents—they will only make changes when they sense that enough people demand them. And the bigger the change, the greater the clamor must be. So we must enlist our fellow citizens in demanding policy changes. Here are some ways you might help accomplish that:

First, the easiest: Forward the video “How It All Ends” to everyone you know. A few clicks, and you get back to your life.

Next up: Forward the video to everyone you know, and then follow up, asking them what they thought, and listening sincerely to their answers. Make this part of your thinking, part of your daily mindset, part of your conversations and concerns. Talk to your friends, and family, and coworkers about this—not on a crusade, but gently, as it comes up. “Do anything interesting this weekend?” “Well, you know, I watched this interesting video that got me thinking. . .” You don’t need to become an evangelist to have an effect. If we have enough people who just sort of go about with this in their daily lives, then that can change the culture. Because in today’s interconnected world, one vote is not just one vote—it can be ten thousand.

Next up: Write to your lawmakers. It’s way easier than you think. Handwritten letters are actually best, because then the staff member who reads it knows someone actually put time into it, rather doing a cut-and-paste as part of a funded campaign. Those are more likely to get passed up the food chain in the legislative office

Next up: This one is actually the overarching idea of all of the actions, but I’m putting it farther down the list of difficulty because it has the word “everything” in it, so it might come across as pretty demanding. It seems clear to me that this is the action that will give the “biggest bang for your buck” because it multiplies itself.

[BOARD, CHECKLIST] You do:
everything you can to
increase public demand for
significant and immediate policy action to
combat global climate change. (Here’s the part where you get creative [pointing to top line].)

Next up: You make changes in your own lifestyle, from small to substantial. Anything from changing your lightbulbs to compact fluorescents, to weatherizing your home, buying Energy Star-endorsed appliances, driving less, driving an economy car or hybrid, driving a biodiesel vehicle, asking your power company if they offer renewables and if not, why not? There are a ton of suggestions out there. Go find ones you can get excited about, and then talk them up to your friends and family.

And my last suggestion is a special one, a radical one for those of you who like to spend time online, or like writing letters to the editor, or just feel really agitated about this—like a firehose that can’t be turned off—and need some direction to point your energy to feel like you’re doing something useful. I’m calling for some Information Warriors. If you’re interested, you’ve got your own video, titled “Your Mission.”

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen a comment along the lines of this one.

[SCREEN] “First, he is confusing my ‘not understanding’ with my ‘not giving a crap’. If we extinct our own species, then we deserve to be gone.”

Apathy is a personal choice, and an individual liberty. As long as it doesn’t impinge on my liberties. But this is sort of militant apathy—”Nothing matters to me. And it doesn’t matter to you, either, bub” is not tolerable. “Fine!” I think. “If you think humanity is a failed experiment, then you’re welcome to check out. But don’t take me—and my kids—with you!” He doesn’t have to care. But he does need to get the hell out of the way of those of us who do care, those of us who want to save our bacon. This guy may never be convinced, but he doesn’t have to.

What’s necessary is for the rest of us to make a great enough effort that the militant apathetics and the unreachable denialists become irrelevant. We’re just going to drag them along as dead weight and save them along with the rest of us. If you’ve been watching this whole time, hopefully you realize this isn’t hyperbole—I’m not talking the end of the species. I’m talking the end of our standard of living. It’s not likely, but it’s increasingly feasible. Why take the chance? We just need to overwhelm these people with enough people who are awake and rational, so that we can implement sufficient solutions in time.

As you decide how much time and money you want to put into this, I would remind you of my anecdote about driving the tractor I shared at the end of “Scare Tactics.” The old saying “A stitch in time saves nine” pretty much sums it up: the more you invest now, the less that will be required later. And in a complex system, sometimes a small difference in what we do now can have a huge difference in what’s demanded later. The guys who know best know how the physical world works have already warned us:

[SCREEN] “The longer we wait to tackle climate change, the harder and more expensive the task will be. (AAAS Board statement)”

”. . .delayed action will increase the risk of adverse environmental effects and will likely incur a greater cost.” (NAS, Joint Science Academies’ Statement)

I would also remind you of the disturbing trend that, over the past 30 years of studying the climate, as the science has gotten better, the picture it paints of climate change has only gotten more severe, and more imminent.

One strategy in deciding what’s worth your time to do, is what I like to think of as choosing your future regrets. We each want to act so that we don’t have any regrets, but there are no guarantees about that. So think about what possible regrets your actions today may be setting you up for in the future. Years down the road, assuming you end up in a regret-able situation, would you rather look back and wish you had worked harder to combat climate change, or that you hadn’t worked so hard? Which is the more likely regret for you to have? Which is the more tragic regret? You can probably guess my opinion. But you ask the question for yourself.

I continually do that exercise, and the more I learn about climate change, the harder I work. It kind of sucks. But I’ve got two little kids, and I’m not at liberty to quit just because it’s hard. In a way, now that I’ve been exposed to the knowledge, I’m infected with possible future regrets. And the only way to inoculate myself—to prevent the possibility of ending up in the lower right corner of the grid, knowing that I could have done more to prevent it, but just didn’t find the time, or couldn’t be bothered—is to invest a reasonable amount of effort now. Because strangely, the effort itself is what prevents the future regret, not the success. Because even if we do end up hosed, I can feel okay about myself, knowing that I did everything that could reasonably be expected, and that history (or myself, or my daughters) won’t judge me too harshly, because even though I may have failed, I made a conscientious effort.

I don’t know. Sometimes I guess ignorance IS bliss. Until the carbon hits the fan, that is. Which—it looks like more and more—is going to happen during my lifetime. And so I am obliged to do all I can to soften the blow. And hope that my assessment turns out to be completely wrong.

And now, of course, I’ve removed the “ignorance is bliss” option for you, by telling you all this. I probably should have warned you before, but it selfishly serves my purpose to infect as many people as possible, so that they accomplish my goals by working to prevent their own future regrets. You’re welcome.

The situation is quite likely urgent—we may be near a tipping point. In a complex system, the only way to identify a tipping point is from the other side. (Oops, there it went.) The only thing we know for certain is that the longer we wait, the more likely we are to pass one.

If we continue operating according to our Saber Tooth Tiger Reflex—where we need to see the danger big, violent, and immediate before we act—we may be doomed, because at that point in a complex system, probably no action would be sufficient. As I mentioned, current climate research seems to indicate that at this point, it may already be too late to avoid significant changes. We can probably still affect how quickly it will happen and how bad it will be. But the longer we wait, the less likely that becomes. And right now, we are choosing ticket B by default.

If that gives you a panicky feeling like it does me, I can suggest moving your choice on the menu of personal action down a couple notches. It helps with the butterflies a bit to know you’re doing all you can.

Which reminds me of how that professor of mine summed up the importance of the issue. Do you remember it? Paper or plastic? Doesn’t matter. Save the whales? Doesn’t matter. Save social security? Doesn’t matter. Sometimes the Chicken Little turns out to be the Paul Revere. Isn’t it worth your time to figure it out, and then decide where this fits in all the other demands in your life, what level of effort you can spare?

As I film this, it’s been only 4 days since I started posting the videos in this project. Happily, I’ve already had a number of people contact me asking if I wanted to work with them on making a website or something around these videos.

No. My wife needs her husband back, my daughters need their daddy back, my students need their teacher back, and I need to get some sleep finally. I can’t take on new project. But YOU can. That’s exactly what I’m talking about. As the knowledge spreads, so does the realization and the motivation, like a virus, or a meme, which is what I’m really talking about.

You have my explicit permission to take these videos and the ideas and phrases and images and words in them, and use them as your own. So build that website around them—even see if you can make some money off them. And you don’t need to contact me for permission or a contract—just do it! Contact me if you want higher resolution versions, or if you want to spread some of your massive profits around. (I have spent a ridiculous amount of money on energy drinks during the last few months—don’t tell my wife.)

But no need to contact me to collaborate—they’re yours now. I give them to you. Mash ‘em up, transcribe them and make a hyperlink index, read them at a poetry slam, expand on them, for goodness sake condense them—tighten them up. Re-post them on other video sharing services. Burn DVDs and sell them at your band’s gigs, pass them out on the street corner—I don’t care! As far as I’m concerned, claim the ideas are your own, record yourself making the arguments, get famous doing so, and make lots of money—I’ve got no ownership here. I just want the ideas to infect as many people as possible, so that we get a shift in the culture that allows our policymakers to enact significant enough action that we can substantially reduce the likelihood of abrupt climate change. And for Pete’s sake, the least you could do is come up with a better tag line than what just came out of my mouth.

In fact, that’s my fantasy, to see this project, these videos, spin completely out of my control. I don’t want to spearhead anything—I’m just trying to kick some pebbles down the slope—you guys are the avalanche.

I’ve worked really hard for this video project to be self-contained, so that it can self-replicate as many times as it needs to without me. Because what we need is a change in culture, and I can’t do that. But a virus—a meme—can. So I’ve designed and released the “virus.” Now it’s your job, as it’s host, to do whatever you can to spread it. I know in today’s terrorism-dominated mentality, speaking of a virus isn’t generally a positive thing. But ideas can be viral too. Let’s use that power. How about you host this one, multiply it, and infect a bunch others.

If you spread the idea of risk management, the understanding of the threat of abrupt climate change and how it works, the motivation to do something about it—that can be orders of magnitude more powerful than simply following the traditional “10 Simple Things You Can Do To Be More Green.” Those are useful, but I’m afraid in this case, they’re not sufficient. I’ve been watching this for a while, and I’ve come to the conclusion that the biggest bang for your buck, the greatest payoff for your investment—and in fact the only thing that will get us into column A—is in spreading the concern. “Many hands make light work,” and all. A number of my friends have complained that that seems like a cop-out—asking other people to change before making big changes yourself—but I’ve been studying it for a while, and I’m convinced.

Think of it this way. If you get 10 people on board, and they each get ten, and each of those gets ten, and each of those gets ten, and each of those gets ten, in just 5 steps, that’s over a hundred thousand people who’ve had their thinking shifted. Because of you. That’s how we shift the culture. That’s how we get policies changed. That’s how we make significant action happen.

In both the natural world, and the computer world, viruses are strong and successful in part because they are decentralized. Still, more gets done if everyone is pulling in the same direction. So I’ll make a suggestion here that might be helpful. How about if you want to find other people or projects interested in working on this kind of thinking about climate change, on this kind of approach in bringing about substantial action by changing the culture, you could use the keyword “Manpollo” or “Manpollo Project,” simply because it’s unique.

As of this taping, the only Google hits on the word are from my previous videos on global climate change. So it’ll be a useful, decentralized way to find other people of similar interests—you just talk about the Manpollo Project, and do your Googling on it to find others. In fact, it’ll be a really cool trick, because it won’t require any organization—so it’s robust, and zero maintenance. And yet there won’t be any confusion, because no one else is using the word, because I just made it up. Cool! So you can easily find each other by using the keyword, and I can go back to my life for a bit without playing traffic control. Of course, I would like to hear what’s going on out there. I’ve invested a huge amount of personal sacrifice in these videos and a few warm fuzzies would help make that worth it, since my ultimate goal of “saving the world” is a little hard to measure, and doesn’t really provide much concrete feedback of a job well done.

So I’m passing the torch. I’m deputizing you. I’m lighting your fire. Cuz, as you may have inferred from the increasing size of the bags under my eyes, this freaking project has consumed me, and it’s time that I go back to being a husband, and a father, and a teacher. And not some sleepless zombie, or corporate shill for the energy drink industry. . .

Tag lines

“If you think abrupt climate change is a monster, you should try this stuff!” [Monster]

“Red Bull gives you wings. And hallucinations.”

“Que Sobe Sobe—no! You grab life by the tail. And hope it doesn’t come off in your hand while life scurries away under a rock?”

“Unless you drink this stuff, abrupt climate change is going to open up a can of it on you.” [Whoop Ass]

“NOS—For when you can’t afford to nos not sleep!”

“Can you believe the size of this? Pretty soon you’ll just open one of these and then climb in.”

“Wired X344—brings out the wonderingmind42 in you!”

I’m just waiting for the endorsement contracts to roll in.

The internet functions like a non-linear “complex” system. What if this turned out to be the tipping point for public perception and political will on climate change in the US? How would it feel to be part of history?

Here’s where you influence which future you’ll have. You can’t predict it for certain, but you can change the probabilities.

Throughout its history, America has led the world in so many ways. Yet on this, we’ve been asleep. But now we wake. And there’s work to do.

It’s time for the best in us to come out.

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