Climate Change – The Long View

There is no longer any debate that global warming is real, and that it is happening now at an alarming rate. It is transforming the global climate system before our eyes. The rise of fossil-fueled economies over the past 200 years, and especially the accelerating CO2 emissions since the end of World War II, is clearly the cause of our mounting climate crisis. But even though 99% of climate scientists recognize what is happening, it can still be difficult to grasp something of such magnitude.

In the short term, it may be alarming to many that suggested measures to reverse the current trend of increasing CO2 emissions will be expensive and lead to increased consumer costs. It will. However, what will be the cost of not paying the price now? At the very least it will mean that we pass on the cost of repair to future generations. More likely it will mean that the amortized cost of not taking immediate action will result in higher overall consumer costs. At worst it will leave our planet uninhabitable for humanity well before we have the ability to leave it and establish our methods on another unsuspecting globe.

“Climate change” inherently involves a historical perspective. We need to think about what physicists call “rate” and “state.” Doing so—taking a deep historical view on an issue that can seem like a contemporary problem—helps us understand the scope and scale of our problem, while also offering hope that it is not too late to mitigate this crisis.

We have already entered a new state: a warmer world; a world of greater weather extremes, rising sea levels, more frequent floods, and more frequent droughts; a world subject to massive hurricanes and raging wildfires.

Worse, the rate of climate change now vastly exceeds anything observed in the last ten thousand years. Since roughly 1850, atmospheric CO2, the dominant greenhouse gas, has grown at an explosive rate, close to what mathematicians call “exponential.” Human population, GDP, and fossil fuel emissions accelerated simultaneously in a similar manner.

The following historically illustrates the problem.

Chart: John Brooke. Data: Population—Angus Maddison and U.N.; GDP—Angus Maddison and World Bank; Emissions—Tom Boden and Bob Andres, Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Gregg Marland, Research Institute for Environment, Energy, and Economics; Atmospheric CO2—NOAA.                               Correction, Sept. 23, 2019                                                                The original chart misstated the multiplier for the Gross Domestic Product line. The chart shows GDP in $10 billions, not $100 millions.