Note: I drafted this post in 2018 but I guess I never finished it and I definitely never published it. In 2025, when Typepad shut down and I moved these posts to a new domain, I discovered this old post sitting here drafted. I am publishing it now as-is (backdated to 2018) to capture my thoughts, but please be aware that it is unpolished, both in the writing itself (e.g. grammar) and in the tone (e.g. maybe I said something regrettable that I would have edited out later). That said, here I go, pushing the publish button …
Two recent, related articles:
Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change
An Interview With ‘Losing Earth’ Author Nathaniel Rich
I probably first became aware of the climate change problem during the 1987-1988 presidential campaign. Al Gore was one of the leading candidates (he ended up coming in third for the Democratic nomination), and the looming climate change problem was one of the pillars of his campaign. He had been trying to draw attention to it since the 1970s, and as the NYT piece recounts, once he had enough power in Congress to do so in the early 1980s, he had held weekly hearings on scientific topics including global warming. Quote from somewhere:
The American Petroleum Institute [commissioned a study from the] Stanford Research Institute … in 1968, which concluded that the burning of fossil fuels would bring “significant temperature changes” by the year 2000 and ultimately “serious worldwide environmental changes,” including the melting of the Antarctic ice cap and rising seas. It was “ironic,” the study’s authors noted, that politicians, regulators and environmentalists fixated on local incidents of air pollution that were immediately observable, while the climate crisis, whose damage would be of far greater severity and scale, went entirely unheeded. And that was a decade after the 1957 study by Humble Oil, an Exxon precursor, that tried to quantify how much of the surging CO2 in the atmosphere was due to oil and gas, and thus represented a liability exposure for those companies.
We, as a society, have made many, many grave mistakes over the decades and centuries. Slavery, Plessy v. Ferguson, and Jim Crow. Japanese interment camps and Guantanamo. Reagan tax cuts and the T—p tax cuts. Most of these are now clearly seen as errors; some are perhaps too recent to yet be recognized as such.
But all are ultimately reversible. Sure, the damage was done, to generations of African-Americans, to Japanese families, to our children in the form of the national debt. But, over time, one can hope that time and steady effort will heal those wounds.
Climate change is different. It is truly irreversible, at least on the timescales of human civilizations. Those glaciers took many millennia to accumulate. The aquifers were holding truly ancient “fossil” water. All that carbon in the ground, in the form of fossil fuel, accumulated there over many millions of years. We have been liquidating those assets in the blink of an eye, in geologic terms.
The bottom of the ecosystems will collapse. We’re already seeing this in the coral reefs,
Eventually we’ll start seeing this impact the ocean’s haline cycle, and then the shit will really hit the fan. Do you know how important the Gulf Stream is to Europe? They will get plunged into a neverending winter and a famine and refugee crisis that has literally never been seen in human history.
From the NYT piece: “[a scientist] has argued that three-degree warming is the realistic minimum. Four degrees: Europe in permanent drought; vast areas of China, India and Bangladesh claimed by desert; Polynesia swallowed by the sea; the Colorado River thinned to a trickle; the American Southwest largely uninhabitable.”
For me, the best illustration of this is in the ice shelves protruding off the Antarctic continent. Those shelves are borne in glaciers on the Antarctic landmass, and reach the shore to extend out over the southern ocean. The part of the glacier close to land has been “stuck” to the land and has been flowing out slowly But in recent years, the melting of that ice has allowed seawater to encroach on that ice-land interface at the bottom of the glacier, and is working its way upstream, under the mass of ice. That seawater is now moving up under the glacier, causing it to accelerate its movement towards the sea.
You don’t undo that by simply stopping the global temperature. That would be like saying you can stop
All this is of course terribly sad.
It’s our generation’s central failure. Previous generations have failed to deal with their problems (slavery, national debt) but later generations corrected the errors. Climate change is uncorrectable — you can’t put the toothpaste back into the tube. And for the rest of human history, we will be cursed for it.
Politically, the must repulsive aspect of this is that those responsible, the GOP that was so perfectly corrupted by oil money, will manage to reframe the conversation as if it isn’t their fault. And they’ll succeed, because the idiot army the Republicans have been cultivating since the 1990s no longer listens to facts or can think critically.
This isn’t meant to be alarmist. It’s meant to be a requiem. It’s so terribly sad that our society drove itself off a cliff like this.
The New York Times article really is a beautiful piece of journalism. You should read it.