10 Years to Climate Collapse

The Gory Details
by Nick van der Leek

About 21 000 years ago, half of present day London was swallowed under towering walls of solid ice, and in America, glaciers extended as far south as Connecticut. ‘So what?’ we say, ‘that was 21 000 years ago.’

During the 80’s and 90’s Global Warming (and its itinerant side effects) were commonly mistaken and dismissed as changes that might occur in centuries, or over tens of centuries.

Well now, that’s changed. Studies of ice cores have demonstrated that Climate Change – drastic change – can happen within a span of 15 years or less. It’s now clear that our climate is inherently unstable. It’s possible that we are here today, with Toyotas, TV and Tiger Oats simply because we’ve been blessed with an anomalously long period (called the Holocene) of climate stability. We’re in Cozy Ages.

Some believe that the next Ice Age was scheduled to start in the last 200 years (another way of saying ‘now’ if you’re a climatologist or geologist’). But instead of a prescribed cooling, the Industrial Revolution kicked in, and thanks to the cheap oil fiesta, instead of getting cooler we’ve been pouring massive amounts of heat inducing agents (principally CO2) into the atmosphere. We may have delayed a little Ice Age in favor of a large Ice Age.

Paradoxically, an Ice Age is always preceded, as far as we know, by a period of warming (including a period of increased CO2 levels: warming = higher CO2 levels necessarily). This has occurred naturally throughout the ages, sometimes with catastrophic effects. Some authors like Kunstler describe is as a wobble going increasingly out of kilter, leading to a crash. Others call it a ‘runaway’ effect, Al Gore describes it as a ‘tailspin of epic destruction’.

As we know, the current warming period is different to the others. This one has the unusual human trademark, which in layman’s terms means millions of belching cars, smockstacks, power stations, factories etc. Our experiement has led to an unusually steep, intense warming period (now already 3 times the most CO2 levels ever measured in the atmosphere in over 400 000 years of ice core samples).

It is fair to suggest that the greater the flux – the higher the peak in the warming phase of our atmosphere – the greater, the more dramatic, the more intense the correction (or the crash).

Think of it like an amorous man. The greater the build-up to the act of love, the more Earth shattering it is when it happens. All of us, through our easy motoring culture, through our collective consumption, through our travels on jet planes and voracious appetites for more and more, have contributed to the current dispensation. In another way it is irrelevant. Massive changes are programmed into the system, and it’s just possible that we have just made the system crash much worse than it would have been. But a crash is a crash.

Al Gore, who ran for the presidency about 6 years ago in America (he was narrowly defeated by a genius called George W. Bush) is currently peddling a documentary called The Inconvenient Truth (screened at the Durban International Film Festival this month).

In it he proposes that the world is cooking, and we have about 10 years to avert a complete meltdown in our planet’s climate mechanism. Think unstable weather, winds, hot, cold, dry, floods – plenty of extremes, storms and destruction.

Personally I doubt whether we can reverse the momentum of our endless attempts to achieve ‘growth’. Perhaps what we can do is build atmosphere processors (on the scale of the Terraformers in the movie Aliens) designed to cool and purify this planet’s atmosphere. But, with over 50 000 new cars being added to South Africa’s roads each month, I’m not sure how much it will help even if we do suddenly receive a memo with urgent present danger information and crisis resolution strategies.

I do believe we have been fortunate enough to live through a comfortable chapter of our planet’s history. We are, I am certain, leaving the Lounge Stage of our civilization, and heading towards the Kitchen Stage. Not being able to stand the heat (or cold) will not be an option we can tune out with a remote control. It will simply be the bed we have made for ourselves, and, being in the kitchen, we’re not likely to sleep very comfortably.

We are at the mercy of the weather, we always have been, and we always will be. It’s just that it’s going to be a lot meaner. What we need to do from now on, at the very least, is preserve what pristine wilderness we have left. They act as a sort of buffer, a sort of cushion. We need to protect these habitats and the species that live in them. If we can do that, perhaps the project of human civilization is also worth saving.