As New Mexico becomes the sun’s anvil, and carbon dioxide rises past 400 parts per million (PPM) in the planet’s atmosphere trapping heat and drying out the American west, the haunting question is: Have we reached the tipping point?
Not five years ago, 350 PPM was said to be the outer limits of CO2 saturation before we’re reached the point of no return. All the warnings, of course, went unheeded. The use of fossil fuels grew enormously all over the planet. Renewable energy was drubbed in the marketplace by its government subsidized opposition.
What does 400 PPM mean in the long run? Will the CO2 congestion keep rising? Will the Pecos, the Rio Grande, Colorado River and other Western watersheds burn up and turn to dust? Will rain come in torrents one month and then not at all for eleven?
Is there any way to find out beyond the speculations of science fiction? Probably not. Nature is always surprising us. It defies prediction. But two historians writing in the Winter 2013 edition of Daedalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, foresee a rather nasty surprise ahead.
Naomi Oreskes and Eric M. Conway, authors of Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Climate Change, have co-authored a hybrid essay of history and science fiction about the not so distant future of climate change.
The essay, The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future, was written by a historian in the Second People’s Republic of China 300 years after the “end of Western culture” in 2073.
While chroniclers have been unable to agree on the causes on the collapse of the Roman and Mayan civilizations, “the case of Western civilization is different because the consequences of its actions were not only predictable but predicted,” writes the Chinese historian in 2374.
“Moreover, this technologically transitional society left extensive records both in twentieth-century-style paper and in twenty-first century electronic formats, permitting us to reconstruct what happened in extraordinarily clear detail.”
What puzzles the future, and the Chinese historian, is that “virtually all agree that the people of Western civilization knew what was happening to them but were unable to stop it. Indeed, the most startling aspect of this story is just how much these people knew, yet how little they acted upon what they knew.”
In the final analysis the future Chinese historian, reflecting the wisdom of the day, was most puzzled by the paradoxical, contrarian stubbornness of political struggles before the collapse of Western culture. “It is clear that in the early twenty-first century, immediate steps should have been taken to begin the Great Energy Transition. Staggeringly, the opposite occurred. At the very time that the urgent need for an energy transition became palpable, world production of greenhouse gases increased.”
A “key turning point” was 2005 “when the U.S. Energy Policy Act exempted shale gas drilling from regulatory oversight under the Safe Drinking Water Act. This statute opened the floodgates (or more precisely the wellheads) to massive increased in shale gas production.”
Conventional wisdom 374 years from now places the cause of the calamitous suffering of the collapse of Western culture on leaders being “trapped in the grip of two inhibiting ideologies: namely positivism and market fundamentalism.”
Positivism is defined as knowledge that is “absolutely positively true,” a concept which makes logical forecasting impossible in the real world. Market Fundamentalism absurdly postulates acquisitive self-interest as the wisest force in guiding social action.
Oreskes and Conway have created a world of the future from trends arising out of the here and now. No one can predict the future, of course. But patterns and directions do have a way of sustaining themselves as long as they can. Sudden changes in history take place with startling regularity. Sudden die-offs take place in nature when optimal conditions change.
If the image of the future presented by the Chinese historian is any way near accurate, however, we all know the overwhelming approximate cause – the government subsidized fossil fuel industry and the colossal sums of money poured into public relations campaigns denying climate change and accusing alternative energy industries as being politically radical, unpatriotic, and a waste of precious investment.
The “staggering” reality is, of course, as the Chinese historian would say, absolutely the opposite.
Let’s stop being distracted by public relations campaigns and other “infotoxins” polluting the public discourse.
Let’s start applying grassroots logic to the situation. If climate change is true, and if it is in large part human-caused, the energy industries releasing CO2 into the atmosphere, and their political champions, are major culprits. Perhaps it’s indelicate to say such a thing, but where else do you pin the donkey’s tail?
Give the Winter 2013 issue of Daedalus a look. One thing we know for sure is that solar and wind energy are not causing global climate change, nor are they bringing extra force to the sun’s hammer on the anvil of New Mexico, nor will they be the cause of the collapse of Western civilization.
May 28, 2013