Last weekend, the Gulf of Mexico caught on fire.
The very next day, the Caspian Sea exploded.
To reiterate: in the span of one week, we witnessed two (2) separate dust-ups between fire and an enormous body of water, and the fact that fire kinda won both times isn’t even the craziest part. The craziest part is that we are less than a week removed from fire scoring a shocking upset against water — historically a lopsided contest — and we’ve all just sort of moved on from the whole thing.
Not too long ago, this would be the leading story on every nightly news broadcast for weeks. In fact, when the BP Deepwater Horizon spill happened eleven years ago, coverage of the disaster reached its peak six weeks after the explosion occurred. What a difference a decade and 134 million gallons of oil apparently makes: now, we respond to footage of the ocean burning with a torpidity usually reserved for a viral clip of Stephen Colbert talking about democracy.
The earth is fucked. Completely, irrevocably, insurmountably and absolutely fucked.
“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.
“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”
-Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
I’ve written before about our remarkable ability to adapt to ever-worsening social, economic, and political conditions, but the same is true for climate change. In fact, it’s perhaps more true for climate change than for anything else. At least when there’s an economic crisis or a terrible piece of legislation steadily working its way through Congress, we respond by putting pressure on those in a position to do something about it. This rarely works because we live in a hell world where the powerful enjoy the spoils and leave the rest of us to suffer the consequences, but at least we give it the ol’ college try.
It’s not hard to raise hell about, say, a discriminatory bill that spells out how it will affect its targets. A bill saying “You can’t get an abortion” is destined to go down in flames, but if that bill says “Abortions may not be performed within 500 feet of a reception area and/or water fountain,” it becomes more difficult to visualize the real-world impact — and, therefore, easier to tell ourselves Well maybe that’s only like three places and not really give a shit. Taken as a whole, people can only reliably spot the connection between cause and effect when the effect immediately follows the cause; the longer it takes for the effect to make itself apparent, the less adept we are at matching it to the relevant cause. As a result, for generations climate change — the effects of which often take decades, centuries, eons to manifest themselves — was more an exercise of the imagination than a tangible threat.
First came the people who assumed Earth would be here forever. They begat the people who realized mankind was changing the planet (and probably for the worse), who begat the people who understood how mankind was harming the planet but assumed it wouldn’t matter for thousands of years, who begat the people who knew the timeline was significantly shorter than “thousands of years” but continued what they were doing anyway and rolled the dice that they still had time to make it someone else’s problem, who begat a handful of billionaires packing for their eventual move to space and the rest of us: seeing roads buckle from 116°F heat in Oregon, telling ourselves it’s still anyone’s ballgame, and watching Mad Max for tips on how to survive the coming water wars. (Apparently a car with a V8 engine is pretty much all you need — if you have that, you’re doing the apocalypse on Easy Mode.)
Sure, technically the planet is not doomed, at least not in any official capacity. Jonathan Franzen found that out in 2019, when he suggested in The New Yorker that we should “stop pretending” we can reduce carbon emissions significantly enough to avoid a climate apocalypse and scientists got mad at him for it.
The scientists were right. Franzen mischaracterized and/or misrepresented a lot of data, including the “2°C” figure often referenced by climate activists and scientists as the tipping point that would trigger a climate apocalypse. In truth, that number is more like a benchmark: once the global mean temperature rises 2°C above its pre-industrial average, most scientists are “medium confident” that some devastating changes to the planet will follow. One example: the polar ice sheets continuing to melt, raising the sea level worldwide, devastating coastal cities, and sparking the inland migration of hundreds of millions of people. Another example: the permafrost thawing and releasing radon gas (from Russia’s stored nuclear materials) and massive amounts of methane, which would in turn dramatically accelerate global climate change and further shrinking the already-abbreviated window of time this planet will remain habitable. Anyway, the scientific community banded together to say Franzen’s interpretation of the data was inaccurate.
Don’t get too comfortable, there’s a “but” coming.
Franzen may have been wrong about what the data says, but his larger point is (perhaps unintentionally) correct. We haven’t officially destroyed the planet yet, which is less a reflection of our efforts to save it and more a testament to how hard it is to kill an entire planet, but make no mistake, we are going to finish the job. The fact that we haven’t done so yet is not a cause for celebration. If you were being stabbed to death, would you think to yourself Well, my heart’s still beating, maybe all this “stabbing” stuff is just a bunch of hoopl--oh boy that’s a lot of blood, my body can make more though right?
For 800,000 years, the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been as low as 170 parts per million (ppmv). And although atmospheric CO2 has reached 300 ppmv before, it never went higher than 300 ppmv. In 1950, we hit 310 ppmv and we’ve never looked back since: in 2019, atmospheric CO2 reached 415 ppmv — a level we haven’t seen for millions of years, since before the dawn of mankind.
Seventy years ago, we came up to a historical boundary and gingerly placed one toe over the line; given the lack of information in 1950, maybe we could be forgiven for breaking that barrier back then. But in the 70 years since, we have come to understand exactly what we are doing to the planet and exactly how much of a danger it poses to both Earth and mankind itself, and we have taken that information and done jack shit with it. In fact, doing nothing would probably be an improvement over what we’ve done, which is “drop the hammer and hope the General Lee can clear this here Grand Canyon.” The effects of the climate change used to be gradual; if they haven’t already, then very soon they’ll start showing up all at once. If there was ever a time to get serious about climate change, it’s right now.
What are we doing instead?
Arguing that fracking is good. Attributing a condo collapse in Miami to “structural damage” to the foundation, yet refusing to acknowledge that erosion from rising sea levels is what cause the damage in the first place. Electing politicians who refuse to do anything about climate change because half of them think climate change is “bullshit” and the other half are only pretending to care. Riding around in dualies, rolling coal at cyclists and all the pussies in their “economy cars.” Lecturing people for driving the pickup truck they need for work instead of an environmentally-conscious suicide vest on wheels like a Tesla. (“Tesla: Martyr yourself for Mother Gaia.”) Building crypto mining farms that use more electricity per year than Sweden. Thinking that the reason Earth is dying is not because 100 companies are responsible for 71% of the world’s emissions, but because people don’t carpool enough.
We’re not going to experience some collective clarity when we all simultaneously realize the error of our ways and band together to save the planet. There’s no come-to-Jesus moment that’s going to spur us into taking the necessary action. If such a moment ever existed, it was when CO2 was approaching the 400 mark and we truck-sticked Jesus and kept on going.
Things are not going to get better. In all likelihood, they are going to get much, much worse. The planet will eventually be rendered unsuitable for human life as we know it. Some of the damage we’ve caused isn’t our fault — we didn’t know what we were doing. Eventually we figured it out, but since then, the more we’ve learned, the less we seem to care. In lieu of taking any action, we’ve chosen to adapt, but we’re running out of road. At some point the changes are going to start coming too thick and fast for us to keep up, and that’ll be it.
Yet in that awful thought, there’s a sliver of…not hope, exactly, but something resembling it. On paper, we have yet to pass the point of no return, but it’s only a matter of time until we do. Most of the damage has already been done, and I’m sure we’ll get around to doing the rest at some point. But just because the outcome is inevitable doesn’t mean it’s immutable: we may not be able to stop the end from coming, but when it comes is still entirely up to us.
At this rate, everything is going to come crashing down, violently and horribly and all at once, but just because we’re on this path doesn’t mean we have to stay on it. Maybe taking action now will give us a chance in the future to prepare for the worst of the climate apocalypse. Maybe, if we’re lucky, taking action now means the climate apocalypse and the end of human life on Earth won’t come all at once, but in waves: gradually and peacefully. Not with a bang, but a whimper.
We can’t save the world. But we can still give it a good death.