The Only Climate Change Book You Need to Read

 

Say the phrase "climate change" to a certain class of generally well-educated and well-placed people, and you will hear how it is the most significant existential threat to humanity, how we should all go around despairing that we as a world community are not doing enough to avert the climate apocalypse that is coming, and that we face either the alternative of doom for humanity or a radical change in political, social, and economic arrangements to avert it.  If you think I'm kidding, take a look at publications like the New York Times or The New Yorker or indeed, most mainstream media. 

 

I've written here on climate change occasionally, but by and large I have taken an agnostic position on it.  A wise teacher I know tells his students that worrying a lot about something you can't personally do anything about is a waste of time, and that's why I haven't expended a lot of mental energy on the topic.  But I did come across a reference not too long ago to a book by Steven E. Koonin entitled Unsettled:  What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters.  Having read the book, I'm now convinced that my attitude toward climate change is the right one, and I now have one of the best-placed persons in the world to back me up.

 

I can't imagine a better-qualified person to write this book.  Koonin's professional career began at Caltech, where he was a professor of theoretical physics, then vice president and provost for several years.  He left academia to become chief scientist for the international energy company BP, and then went into government and was President Obama's Undersecretary for Science in the U. S. Department of Energy.  He now holds positions at New York University.  So he is a product of academia, industry, and government, and has seen all three from the inside as a leader and participant.

 

Perhaps it is his early training as a physicist that makes him cut through the sound bites, breathless stories about polar bears, and even the periodic Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, and go straight to the peer-reviewed, observation-based data and ask the question, "How sure are we that this alleged climate catastrophe is going to happen?"  The answer suitable for a 1000-word column is, "Not sure enough to turn the world upside down."  Koonin has never met a piece of hype he couldn't see through to get to the raw data that it was allegedly based on. 

 

The first part of the book examines the accuracy, consistency, and meanings of the climate data on which the IPCC and other climate-change reports are based.  Take rising sea levels, for example, which have inspired pictures of the Statue of Liberty wading in the Atlantic up to her waist.  One overarching point he makes in this section is that climate is something that can't be determined without taking long-term averages, ideally over periods of 20 to 30 years or more, while weather is what's going on outside your window right now.  For one thing, global sea level has varied as much as 100 meters (that's about 330 feet) over the last half million years, falling as ice ages take up water and rising as they end.  We're currently right at the end of the last melting period, as it turns out.  A plot of the last 24,000 years shows a rise of about 120 meters followed by a nearly flat period over the last 5,000 years—in other words, during the historic era.  The bottom line here is that it's much too early to tell if the rise in carbon-dioxide levels due to fossil-fuel use is going to make much of a difference in the average sea level.  The true climatological answer won't be known in any of our lifetimes. 

 

And it's basically the same or worse for any of the other climate tragedies that have become boogeymen to scare children with over the last twenty years or so.  The worst aspect of the distortions and false terrors concerns violent weather:  hurricanes, tornadoes, and so on.  By two different measures, the frequency of tornadoes in the U. S. is probably going down, not up, although with modern Doppler radars it is easier to detect them than it used to be.  And the annual fluctuations in something called the "power dissipation index" in the North Atlantic, which is correlated with hurricanes, are bigger than any so-called upward trend. 

 

After showing how the actual data reveal that the IPCC, governments, and journalists have hyped climate change with cherry-picking, tendentious interpretations, and sometimes outright lies, he examines why this whole mess has come about.  He concludes it is a combination of publish-or-perish pressure on scientists, desire for click-bait headlines on the part of the media, and a public that is poorly informed on even basic procedures of science.  The "if it bleeds, it leads" mentality of yellow journalism has only gotten worse via the Internet and its penchant for 280-character summaries of topics that deserve a book like this one. 

 

Although Koonin doesn't mention the following factor, I think a contributing aspect to the climate-change hype is the gradual secularization of Western culture.  Modern science arose from the Christian conviction that the universe was designed by an intelligent Being and was therefore capable of being figured out, because it follows logical rules.  If most people no longer hold that view, it is an open question as to how long they will insist on looking at the data themselves, as Koonin does, versus being swept up in a public-relations fantasy that is based on greed for power and wealth rather than disinterested respect for knowledge.  I don't think it's a coincidence that many of the so-called "climate change deniers" (which does not include Koonin) have a Christian background.  Yes, there are Christian ignoramuses too, but just because an idiot takes a certain view of a thing doesn't mean the view itself is wrong.

 

Before you listen to another word on climate change, read Koonin's book.  You'll never think about it the same way again.

 

Sources:  Steven E. Koonin's Unsettled:  What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters was published in 2021 by BenBella Books, Dallas, Texas. 

Jonathan Franzen Gives Up On Controlling the Climate

Jonathan Franzen is a novelist and also writes essays that are published in places like The New Yorker.  As he admits, he's not a scientist or a policy wonk, but that doesn't keep him from putting his oar in on climate change. 

In a recent essay posted on The New Yorker's website entitled "What If We Stopped Pretending?" Franzen gives what at first glance appears to be a counsel of despair.

First, he admits that anybody under thirty is "all but guaranteed" to witness what he calls the "radical destabilization of life on earth—massive crop failures, apocalyptic fires, imploding economies, epic flooding, hundreds of millions of refugees fleeing regions made uninhabitable by extreme heat or permanent drought."  This will happen when "climate change, intensified by various feedback loops, spins completely out of control."  The only way to keep this from happening, according to authorities he cites such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is if every major greenhouse-gas-emitting nation on the planet imposes what amounts to a climate dictatorship:  instituting "draconian conservation measures, shut[ting] down much of its energy and transportation infrastructure, and completely retool[ing] its economy."  And that means everybody, not just folks who agree with the idea.  And here he gets personal:  "Making New York City a green utopia will not avail if Texans keep pumping oil and driving pickup trucks."  (I live in Texas, but I don't personally drive a pickup truck.)

Then he says in effect, "Hey, I'm a realist.  This isn't going to happen.  So you know what?  I'm giving up on it.  We might as well face it:  the apocalypse is coming, and we better just get ready for it."  We shouldn't quit trying to reduce carbon emissions, but we also shouldn't con ourselves into believing that our little token individual actions are going to make much difference. 

He winds up his essay by encouraging people to make your own little corner of the world better in whatever way you can—improving democratic governance, helping the homeless, and just generally being a good citizen, whether or not it makes a difference in climate change.  "To survive rising temperatures, every system, whether of the natural world or of the human world, will need to be as strong and healthy as we can make it."  In other words, we should fight smaller battles we have a reasonable chance of winning instead of putting all our eggs in the basket of averting climate change.

There is a syndrome that workers in the helping professions call "compassion fatigue."  Even if a naturally compassionate person chooses a job such as assisting Alzheimer's patients or children with terminal cancer, constantly having to come up with sympathy for someone who isn't going to get better can be tremendously draining.  And after months or years of such work, some people simply burn out—they can't take it anymore. 

Something like this seems to have happened to Franzen.  If he's like many people who see climate change as the most important existential threat to humanity, it's the kind of thing that you can never quite put out of your mind.  If you're not actively part of the solution, out there with Greta Thunberg protesting on the steps of the UN, then you're part of the problem merely by living a normal life in the U. S.  It's understandable that Franzen would choose to unburden himself by saying publicly,"Look, let's face it.  The train's coming at us in the tunnel and there's no way out.  Let's use the time we have to make things better, rather than fooling ourselves into thinking we can stop the train."

I'm not a climate scientist either, but I'm willing to make a prediction that I feel very confident about.  The way that climate change actually plays out is not going to fit anybody's prediction exactly, simply because it's far too complicated and long-term for anyone to predict with accuracy.

In 2018, the peak level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 407 parts per million, up about 2.5 ppm from the previous year.  20 million years ago, it was about that high, and the all-time high record for carbon dioxide, according to various estimates that scientists have made, was around 2000 ppm some 200 million years ago.  So it's not like the planet has ever seen such high levels before.  Life survived, although many species went extinct and others arose to take their places.

Now admittedly, we are doing a radical thing to the planet, and there will be consequences.  But just as the way an individual human deals with a threatening crisis affects the outcome, the way human beings deal with what may turn into a climate crisis will also affect the future of humanity. 

When Franzen writes that climate change may "spin out of control," I would point out that strictly speaking, climate has never been under our control.  True, you can adjust a thermostat that is labeled "Climate Control," but its influence is limited to your house.  For all of human history, the weather is something that human beings have simply had to accept, not something they could control in any meaningful sense.  We are now engaged in the first-ever unintentional attempt at climate control, or at any rate climate influence, by emitting so much carbon dioxide, and in the coming years and decades we will be scrambling to deal with the consequences. 

But not in the way Franzen fantasizes in his scenario to stop worldwide emissions.  If the world really shut down much of its energy and transportation infrastructure, that is in itself would cause economies to implode.  So in that case the cure for climate change would be just as bad as the disease. 

The only way humans have survived on this planet as long as we have is that we are adaptable.  If crops start failing in some parts of the world, other parts will get better.  If coastlines shrink, people have the ability to move, assuming their governments will let them.  Franzen has caught a lot of flak for his essay, but I think he ends up in a better place than a lot of other people who keep banging the same drum in favor of a global climate dictatorship.  I agree with his advice to do what you can to limit climate change, but mainly, start with yourself to be a better person and to make the part of the world you can control to be a better place, no matter how warm it gets.

Sources:  Jonathan Franzen's essay "What If We Stopped Pretending?" appeared on Sept. 8, 2019 on The New Yorker website at https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/what-if-we-stopped-pretending.  For historical numbers on carbon dioxide levels, I consulted a graph published in Nature at https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms14845/figures/4.