[#10] We Saw it Coming: Predictable, but not Inevitable.

[Excerpt from upcoming book — It’s Getting Hot in Here: Reflections of a climate hawk grappling with the inevitable]

“But while I believe that events are predictable, I do not believe that they are preordained. That is the difference between realism and fatalism.” — Sarah Kendzior, speech, St. Louis, 2023

I’ve a vivid memory as a kid flying across the country — below were cultured, geometric shapes as far as my eye could see. I turned to my dad. ‘Is the world a giant farm?’ He laughed, but it turns out I was right. We use more than half the landmass and consume a third of the biomass it produces. Domesticated animals weigh more than fifteen times their wild cousins[1]. Years later, a friend in a London pub told me a squirrel could once travel from one end of the country to the other on treetops. England ran out of trees five hundred years ago. That we’ve the power to shape[2] the world — for better or worse — has been obvious for some time (even to kids).

The Anthropocene refers to a new geological age in which our planet is shaped by humans. It marks the end of the Holocene, the cradle of stability since the last ice age in which human civilization was born. Some argue the Anthropocene began with the emissions of the first steam engine. For others it was the radioactive signature of the nuclear age. A few point to wide dispersal of indestructible, synthetic chemicals. For me, it was always linked to what I glimpsed from that plane — a planet turned productive factory. Whenever it started, it’s indisputable Bad Warming heralds a new geologic era wrought by human activity.

There remains a whiff of innocence about climate risk. The agricultural and industrial revolutions, fed by fossil fuels, begat progress and freedom as we decoupled ourselves from nature and economic gain from the drudgery of work. John Stuart Mill framed individual autonomy as dependent on “a high degree of success in [our] struggle with Nature”[i]. Fossil fuels built the modern world in that noble struggle. Our smokestacks and tailpipes were a pittance against a limitless sky. We never saw this coming. That is until recently, when a few good scientists — led by Carl Sagan and Jim Hansen in the 1980s — opened our eyes. Somewhat surprised, we scramble to respond. On this account Bad Warming is an historical accident. We would have done the right thing earlier, had we known better.

This narrative is more fable than fact.

Humans have long disrupted nature. For those of religious bent, the Bible gave us ‘dominion over’ it. For those inclined to science, Francis Bacon declared our opposable thumbs and big brain made us masters over it. Saint-Simone, an early architect of modern capitalism gave its peak expression: “The object of industry is the exploitation of the globe…the appropriation of its product for the needs of man; and by accomplishing this task, it modifies the globe and transforms it, gradually changing the conditions of its existence.”[ii] This view is not limited to modern, colonizing peoples. Anytime anatomically modern humans arrived in a new place, from North America to Australia, the decimation of large fauna soon followed[3]. The degree to which we shaped nature was defined more by capacity and less by cultural constraint[4].

We’ve known the mechanism of global warming for two centuries. A long line of influential scientists — Fourier, Tyndall, Arrhenius, Keeling, Haldrane — preceded Hansen. Eugene Huzar correctly predicted in the early 1800’s “In one or two hundred years…the world will emit billions of cubic meters of carbonic acid and carbon oxide…[which] may indeed disturb the harmony of the world”[iii]. Scientific warnings like these, from Huzar to Hansen, are but spittle in a storm surge of lobbying, malfeasance, vested interests and willful blindness. It has always been so. Groups who today claim no historic responsibility for the development of fossil fuels, embrace them nonetheless.

There have been (and are) many gentle peoples who bucked this trend. Groups satisfied with a quiet life in tune with the flows and breezes around them, who find both meaning and sustenance in the toil required to live absent the dominant global path of ever-increasing energy use, technological development and ambition to improve one’s material lot. And there have always been those who urged caution, a limit to our voracious appetites. Naomi Klein plays that role today. But human history was never kind to such people, as those on the modern voracious path pushed them aside. This is not a normative tale (what’s right) but an empirical one (what happens).

None of this makes Bad Warming inevitable.

There are many points at which it seems we could have pivoted away from Bad Warming. If Gore hadn’t lost the election by a few hanging chads (or Roger Stone couldn’t hold fake riots outside counting rooms). If Rupert Murdoch, the single biggest accelerant for climate delusion, had been educated on climate risk early on (or if Reagan hadn’t gutted the Fairness Doctrine that spawned FOX in the first place). If the Three Mile Island disaster hadn’t prevented a nuclear renaissance. Or if Jimmy Carter had the oratory skills during the OPEC crisis to launch a renewables effort equivalent to Kennedy’s call to space. We’ll never know which, if any, of these events may have changed our course. All are now road-kill on the fossil fuel highway.

History is an endlessly contingent affair. What may have been. If only. Some view history as created by heroic (or villainous) individuals and events — the “Great Person theory”. Change an event or insert a hero at the right time and the story rolls another way: were Rupert Murdoch a climate hawk America might have saved the day. Others, like sociologist Hubert Spencer, believe the opposite — culture as shaping force. Events and individuals are created by society and are products of their time: only an amoral manipulator could both create and ride the modern misinformation wave that is FOX.

To think Bad Warming inevitable one must simultaneously reject both the Great Person theory and deny climate risk as cultural force. That is, no single event could have prevented our predicament nor could recent history be influenced by broad awareness of climate risk. This seems absurd. While I don’t think either theory of history complete — like any complex system, a single narrative or framework is insufficient to explain causation — both admit of alternative possibilities. Only in retrospect can we construct narratives of inevitability.

Bad Warming was never inevitable, but it was easy to predict.

Fossil fuels were readily exploitable, and created incumbents of enormous wealth and influence. We couldn’t get to solar, renewables and batteries without burning them first. The downside risk doesn’t materialize until decades after the benefit, giving incumbents cover to increase their economic, social and political stranglehold. Scientific alarm was never going to outmuscle the ambition to use more.

Might an individual claim innocence? Eggheads and specialists saw this coming, but how could the rest of us? Separating the climate signal from cultural noise was never easy. But collective rationality doesn’t require we each understand the risk, only that our better judgement confirms eggheads and specialists (IPCC and NASA) are more credible than FOX and Exxon. That’s a low bar for participating democracies with free public schools.

This fable of innocence lost — oops, it was an accident! — provides cover for a kind of modernity in which rational thought enables society to progress so as to make our predecessors appear antiquated. Human rationality isn’t the sum of individual thoughts, but manifest by collective action over historical time. A pragmatist sees value not in thought itself, but in how it’s expressed. Aristotle saw morality the same way: it matters not what you think is right, but what you do about it. Climate concerns of institutionalized rationality — the collective Academies[5] — were brushed aside by those motivated and powerful enough to do so. We knew all along but didn’t act — what a horrid self-image! And so we pretend we didn’t know, at least until heroic Hansen came along.

Two decades ago my older brother Marc, reacting to my arm-waving climate alarm, musing “Ya, it’s real, but we’re not going to stop until everyone feels it”. I thought him overly pessimistic. But he was right. We never stop shaping the earth until it forces us to. All that radiation? Meh, out of sight out of mind. Those never-ending farms? Maybe the wolves and bears cared, we didn’t. Bad Warming is just Earth’s first punch back that really hurts.

We’re not new in shaping the earth. Life has always done so. In this, we’re not exceptional. Three billion years ago blue algae fixed enough carbon and released enough oxygen to enable animals to breath. The difference is our awareness. But cultural awareness — the warnings of science — is not personal awareness. That comes from direct experience — rising seas on your street, smoke from wildfires in your neighbourhood, failed crops in your supply chain. Marc’s observation captured that distinction. Until it’s personal, it won’t matter. And by then, it’s too late.

Looking forward, we can predict a shift from Bad to Catastrophic Warming. We lose our grip on mitigation: lose hope, see further failure as inevitable, focus on battening down the hatches, and enter into a zero-sum geopolitical game for dwindling resources. That outcome is in no way inevitable. The historic pivot points are in plain sight today: a political resurgence of climate as a priority, the economic forces of cleantech gain influence, and Greta Thunberg's global cultural campaign of awareness extends its reach.

Even a kid looking out a plane’s window forty years ago could see we’ve shaped the earth. In the Anthropocene, the Garden of Eden is a failed farm and we lose a different innocence: nature becomes artifact, an object of culture. Ironically, having successfully shaped it on a global scale we revert to a more primitive state in which we are once again at its mercy. Instead of playing Sir Francis Bacon’s ringmaster to an obedient Nature we find ourselves entangled in the nasty feedbacks of an irritable response we’ve triggered.

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[1] Domestic animals are nearly two thirds, and humans a third.

[2] Climate risk is but one indicator among many, from biodiversity loss to altered nitrogen and phosphorus cycles to resource scarcity.

[3] Australia and the America’s, for example, saw most large mammals (72–88%) disappear shortly after humans arrived. Even small bands of ancient humans with very little technology managed to alter ecosystems forever.

[4] It requires a longer argument to make this point. And there have been (and are) highly differentiated cultural approaches to nature. But on a geologic time cale, humans are more alike than it may seem on a political one.

[5] Universities, cultural institutions like Royal Societies, any collective that represents, stores or advances human thought.

[i] Mill, J.S., Considerations on Representative Government (1861), Serenity Publishers, 2008, pg. 40.

[ii] See Doctrine de Saint-Simon, vol 2, Paris: Aux Bureaux de l’Organisateur, 1830, pg, 219

[iii] Huzar, E., L’Arbre de la Science, Paris:Dentu, 1857, pg 106.