When you are in a fight, as we are for the health of our planet, you had better study your enemy. But for us that is simultaneously easy and hard. We are the enemy. For all sorts of reasons, we do not like the hard truth. We soften bad news. We puff up the positive. For most of us it just comes naturally. So what? So, a lot.
Take global warming. Not the activity, but the label. “Warming” is a comfortable word. It is gentle. You cuddle up to “warming”. But it is a complete mischaracterization. The worst that “warm” can be is “Very warm” or “So warm!” It is a soft expression, and it affects our judgement.
I want to call it global heating. That is honest and to the point. The desert does not get warm; it gets bloody hot. Throughout geologic history there have been huge deserts[1] covering parts of North America, for example. Take the Sahara and plop it into the U.S. and you get the picture. The label “global heating” at least keeps us more aware of what the earth can produce.
But a fundamental level, the heating itself is not the problem. All species can “move” with their ecosystem when it moves. They can follow it up the mountain, or if it shifts latitude north or south, for example. It is rapid heating that is the problem, and rapid heating is what we are doing to our planet. Rapidly changing living conditions fatally upsets ecosystems and introduces the domino effect. Kill the krill and you kill the whale.
Enter “Net Zero”. No worries, it suggests. Zero. Get control of emissions. Drop them to match what the world can absorb, and you have it. Balance. Whew!
However, Net Zero is just a puffed-up solution likely born of necessity in an advisors’ committee to help get some resolution passed. Net Zero is only a point we visit in passing. It is an illusion to think of it as anything approaching a solution.
Imagine that a man poked a sleeping bear. Now, as it charges angrily at him, the man makes a sincere promise to immediately adopt Net Zero. From now on, he swears boldly, he will only use the poker with a force the bear can easily absorb. Of course that is absurd. However, his real mistake is that he was acting under the illusion that if he triggered a response, he still would have control over the situation. He does not, of course. The bear is now a mass of hormones and teeth looking for revenge. Our bear is global heating but without the fear of posture and exaggerated confidence you can use against a bear, even under those circumstances. We have poked it and now its mindless “anger” has been unleashed. Our climate “bear” is now a mess of positive feedback cycles, powerful forces of a scale far beyond our easy control, if at all.
Positive feedback cycles have the nasty habit of feeding their own growth. Many know of the positive feedback cycle at the poles, how the melting of snow and ice decreases the amount of sunlight’s energy that gets reflected back to space. More and more water and land get exposed to incoming sunlight, both get warmer, and that just increases the melting. And so on. Like the bear, it is a beast onto itself.
And, speaking of the Arctic, there is another much-less-known overlapping positive feedback cycle up there. Look at the extent of the tundra in this map[2]. Enormous. There, for millennia, have sat huge stores of half-rotten vegetation locked in the permafrost, a zone which is no longer permanently frozen, but is being melted by the heating planet. What is the problem? Melting permafrost emits methane[3], a gas that is 28 to 36 times[4] worse a Green House Gas than carbon dioxide. The hotter the planet, the more it releases methane, which causes the planet to heat up, and so on, and so on.
The point is that our contribution to these cycles is only to have thrown their active forces out of a balance they had maintained since we invented agriculture, more or less. We woke them and they are running rampant. And, although we could make them worse, they no longer need our input to grow. And, worse, they do not grow at some constant rate. Their very nature is to accelerate. All we are doing is aiding and abetting. Our contributions through agriculture and excessive burning of fossil fuels just increase their acceleration.
We are heating the globe: Global Heating. And we are doing it rapidly: Rapid Global Heating. But worse, we are helping its natural acceleration. Accelerating Rapid Global Heating. ARGH! That is the problem.
The idea of Net Zero give us the impression that we will have stopped exacerbating climate change by achieving it. But, as we see, there are two independent forces at work here. We and our profligate ways are just one. The natural world forces have outpaced us long ago. Net Zero hides a problem that we must face head on. We must drastically cut our own emissions far faster and store far more carbon through intense reforestation than politicians and the general public think is necessary.
Stop with the Net Zero. ARGH!
[1] https://iugs-geoheritage.org/geoheritage_sites/the-jurassic-navajo-sandstone-at-coyote-buttes-and-the-wave/
[2] https://www.grida.no/resources/13519
[3] https://www.iea.org/reports/global-methane-tracker-2022/methane-and-climate-change
[4] https://greenly.earth/en-gb/blog/ecology-news/what-is-methane-and-how-does-it-contribute-to-global-warming
*****
Robert M. de Chazal, inventor and CEO of SunDraco Power Inc. (Sundraco.com), is a member of SCAN!.