As World War Two was starting in Europe, the American President Franklin
Delano Roosevelt used the metaphor of a “four-alarm fire up the street” that
needed to be extinguished immediately, whatever the cost.
The situation in 1940 was not merely a crisis, what with Europe engulfed
and Britain under attack. It was an emergency:
there was a danger of not acting quickly enough while there was still a chance
of reversal and recovery.
An emergency is when there is a shrinking time window for taking effective action. Suppose you are alone
and see a fire spreading up the stairwell of a building full of sleeping
people. Which do you do first, wake up everyone by breaking a few windows or
phone the fire fighters?
It depends on the time lag for the action that will save the occupants,
not the building. In the country it will take fifteen minutes for help to
arrive—and in that length of time, the fire could spread throughout the
building. In an urban setting with a three-minute response time and a mobile
phone in your pocket, it’s a different answer.
Actively managing an emergency response is something that the military
teaches its senior officers and we medical school professors teach to medical
students and residents. Get fluids and vasopressors started up front. Make sure
that you think of a number of possible diagnoses early, rather than fixating on
the most obvious one. Get the lab started on all of them. If you don’t think of
a second possibility until giving up on the first, and it takes another hour to
get the lab results back, the unnecessary delay can see the patient’s condition
become irretrievable.
Few people seem to approach climate change in this manner. One must start
with questions such as:
How fast is the
damage spreading?
The
increase in extreme weather events (deluge and drought, prolonged heat waves,
windstorms, big hailstones, and such) since the supersized El Niño of 1998 is
the relevant indicator, not global average temperatures. Extreme events are no
longer tracking our usual indicator, the slow ramping up of average
near-surface air temperature, averaged globally and over all four seasons.
What’s the
irrecoverable condition that we must focus on?
Focus on the setups
for global economic collapse, as it can set up a human population crash via
famine, disease, resource wars, and genocides. Recovery will be much delayed by
memories of what happened between groups during the "downsizing.”
What is the time it
takes to back out of the danger zone?
Most
would say centuries; my perhaps over-optimistic estimate is 24 years. See my
post on an emergency CO2 drawdown for caveats.
“It’s
already too late” is one of the premature opinions about our escalating climate
crisis. Yet no one has done a serious analysis of this.
Have we already
passed the “Last Exit” on this Expressway to Hell? Or just most of the exits?
If we
want a restoration before global economic collapse sets in, we have indeed
already passed most possible exits, e.g., reforestation. Methods that take a
century will be too little, too late.
Removing
the excess CO2 from the air and stashing it in the ocean depths for thousands
of years appears to be the only avenue remaining that promises to be big
enough, sufficiently quick, and dependable enough in a situation where we are
unlikely to get a second chance. It also reverses the other major threat to the
food supply, the acidification of the oceans.
So yes, the climate emergency is already upon us. In
retrospect, it started back in 1998 with that supersized El Niño.
Our usual framing, with
near-surface averaged temperature as the relevant input and emissions reduction
as the appropriate response, has failed us—however logical it was a
half-century ago.
