Crawling from the Wreckage (4 page)

As recently as 2005, climate change was just another subject that I wrote about from time to time. It was a big problem for the future, probably, but so were lots of other things. As Calvin Coolidge remarked: “If you see ten troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you.”

Then, by the late summer of 2005, the Arctic sea ice cover crashed by almost 50 percent, and the real outlines of the crisis had become visible, even to an overworked journalist with a short attention span
.

When I went back to the articles I had written in 2006, I was quite startled to see how clear and fast my shift was from distant concern to tight focus. During the first three months of that year, I wrote three articles on apparently unconnected topics that ended up being very connected indeed. It’s the way the mind works, or at least mine does—I don’t always know how an article is going to end when I start it—and my mind was obviously working hard to put the pieces together
.

Mind you, I had a lot of help from Jim Lovelock, who was willing to say the things other scientists worried about only in private
.

“We are in a fool’s climate, accidentally kept cool by smoke, and before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.” If anybody but James Lovelock had said that, you’d dismiss him as an attention-seeking panic-monger. But it was Lovelock himself.

A couple of centuries from now, Lovelock’s reputation as an original and influential thinker in the life sciences may rival Charles Darwin’s. On the other hand, it’s possible that nobody will remember either him or Darwin two centuries from now, because there may be no civilization left. It is already too late to stop drastic global warming, he says, and the catastrophes that follow may sweep everything away.

Lovelock’s great scientific insight began with a question: why is the Earth’s climate, and even the very composition of the atmosphere itself, so radically different from what it would be on a dead planet? The Earth’s two neighbours, Venus and Mars, have atmospheres that are almost entirely carbon dioxide, whereas the carbon dioxide in our own atmosphere is only one-third of 1 percent. That makes all the difference because it keeps our world cool.

At our planet’s distance from the Sun, a carbon dioxide atmosphere would give the Earth an average surface temperature of 290 degrees Celsius, far too hot for life. Venus, only one-third closer to the Sun than us, but blanketed with carbon dioxide, has a temperature of 465 degrees Celsius. So, what, exactly, removed the carbon dioxide here, gave us this lovely, thin, oxygen-and-nitrogen atmosphere, and maintained the Earth’s average surface temperature at between ten and twenty degrees Celsius for the past 3.5 billion years? Life, of course.

The Earth’s early atmosphere was almost all carbon dioxide. On a lifeless world, the carbon dioxide would gradually have gotten thicker (it comes from volcanoes and accumulates over time), and the planet would have gotten hotter and hotter. But here, early life forms incorporated the
carbon from the carbon dioxide into their bodies and released the oxygen into the atmosphere as a waste product. New forms then evolved that could use the oxygen to run a far more efficient metabolism, and the whole biosphere took off.

The Earth teems with life because the temperature is liveable, and that is so because the atmosphere stays largely free of carbon dioxide. In fact, the average surface temperature on this planet has varied only within a narrow range of ten or fifteen degrees Celsius over the past 3.5 billion years, despite all the ice ages and warming spells that seem to bring such dramatic changes. The Sun’s heat output has increased by about 20–30 percent during that time, and still the climate hasn’t changed. Something is actually
keeping
it stable.

To explain the phenomenon, in the 1970s Lovelock hypothesized that as living things evolved on this planet, they actually shaped their environment through complex chemical feedback loops that maintain the average temperature, the salinity of the oceans, and various other key variables at the levels best suited to life.

Lovelock was going to call this complex mechanism the “biocybernetic universal system tendency,” but a neighbour of his, Nobel Prize–winning novelist William Golding, persuaded him to call it “Gaia” instead. It was a mistake. New Age romantics embraced the concept, but their enthusiasm actually slowed down scientific acceptance of the concept. Only in the past decade has Lovelock’s theory, now renamed “Earth system science,” been widely accepted among mainstream scientists.

Lovelock has worried aloud about global warming for thirty years because though the living feedback mechanisms that keep the atmospheric carbon dioxide down are good at dealing with gradual changes, they are unable to cope with the speed at which the level has been rising since the industrial revolution. “The Earth is about to catch a morbid fever that may last as long as one hundred thousand years,” he warns, with temperatures rising five degrees Celsius worldwide and as much as eight degrees Celsius near the poles by 2100.

We are living in a “fool’s climate,” Lovelock says. Our climate seems normal only because atmospheric pollution in the northern hemisphere is reflecting much sunlight back into space and keeping global temperatures low. At some point, however, something will cause a major industrial downturn—a war that doubles the price of oil, a flu pandemic,
whatever—and within weeks the smoke will thin out dramatically. Then we will find out how hot it really is already.

There will be repeated episodes of this sort as the carbon dioxide builds up during this century, he predicts, and in the long run, civilization will collapse in most places. Much of the densely populated tropics will become desert and scrub, massive population movements will overwhelm borders, billions will die of hunger, and war will take care of most of the rest.

Now Lovelock is saying that it’s already too late to avert that outcome: “We will do our best to survive, but sadly I cannot see the United States or the emerging economies of China and India cutting back in time, and they are the main source of emissions. The worst will happen …”

I don’t know if Lovelock is right, but I take him very seriously. He is, as he says, a “cheerful sod,” and he didn’t used to talk like this. It’s very worrisome.

I still don’t accept that this outcome is inevitable, but I take Lovelock’s point: people and countries will have to behave in more responsible and far-sighted ways than they normally do if we are to have a decent chance of averting the worst outcome. And there’s not much sign of such a change, is there?

The following month, I started writing a piece about China, and ended up with approximately the same conclusion
.

It’s exactly the sort of document that an American think tank would have produced in the year 1900, if they had had think tanks in 1900. This time it’s the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the leading research institute in the world’s most populous country, and the document is called
China Modernization Report 2006
.

That imaginary American think tank of a century ago would certainly have predicted massive urbanization and far higher incomes in the United States by 1950, as those trends were already well established at the time. It might not have forecast that half the American population
would own automobiles by 1950, let alone that tens of millions of Americans could afford to travel abroad by then, but another, bolder forecaster might have done so. Either way, when it all came true, nothing terrible happened as a result.

Alas, the Chinese Academy of Science’s predictions won’t come true because terrible things will start to happen in China long before 2050. This is deeply unfair: all that China wants for its citizens is the same lifestyle that most Western countries had achieved by 1950. But we got away with it because we were the first countries to industrialize, and China won’t because it is so big and because it has come so late to the game.

The report, published on February 9, glows with enthusiasm for the predicted rise in Chinese incomes—tenfold by 2050, to $1,300 CAD a month—for the five hundred million peasants who will move to the cities and for the six hundred million city dwellers who will move out into hi-tech suburban homes. Half of China’s people will own their own cars and be able to afford overseas travel, the report predicts. But I don’t think so.

The Chinese people deserve prosperity, and they have waited too long for it, but they cannot have it in the classic Western style. Take the cars alone. Within a decade, China will be the second-largest automobile manufacturer on the planet—but for half the Chinese population to own cars, the world’s total stock of motor vehicles must almost double. For half of Indians and Brazilians and Russians also to own cars (and all these people have similar expectations), the number of cars on the planet must triple.

It doesn’t work at the local level (nine of the world’s ten most polluted cities are already in China), and it doesn’t work at the global level either. It is taboo to say so outside of scientific and environmental circles, because the rapid growth of the Chinese and Indian economies is now the main motor driving world economic growth, but it cannot go on like this.

At the beginning of the Second World War, the world had two billion people, about one-quarter of whom lived in industrialized countries—but few of them owned cars, or ran air conditioners, or travelled abroad.

Forty years later, there were four billion people. Those who lived in fully industrialized societies consumed far more energy and produced far more waste, as a “modern” lifestyle now included cars, meat in most meals, electrical appliances galore and, for many people, foreign travel, but they
were still only one-quarter of the world’s population. Total human pressure on the environment? Up five- or sixfold in forty years.

Now we have six-and-a-half billion people in the world, and one-quarter of the human race is living in developed countries, so the pressure on the environment is roughly ten times what it was in 1940. But the predicted development of China by 2050 (and the comparable growth of India, Brazil and Russia) will raise the share of the human race living in high-consumption industrial economies to more than half of the global population—which will exceed eight billion by that time. Total human pressure on the environment? Perhaps twenty-five times higher in a single century.

It’s China’s turn, and it’s monstrously unfair that it cannot just follow the same development path that Britain first carved out in the late 1800s, and the rest of the West followed in the 1900s. But it can’t. You cannot get away with that style of development anymore when the world is already as damaged as it is now.

The most frightening map I have ever seen is one published in James Lovelock’s new book,
Revenge of Gaia
: it shows what proportion of the Earth’s surface would remain suitable for agriculture if the average global temperature went up by five degrees Celsius. None of China is habitable (above desert population densities) except Manchuria. None of India makes it either, except the foothills of the Himalayas, and none of the United States, except the Pacific Northwest.

That is a completely unacceptable outcome of headlong “modernization” in the old style, and it makes the
China Modernization Report 2006
look like a fantasy. Somewhere between now and the future China envisages for 2050, the negative consequences of continuing down the present path will become so large and undeniable that the current pattern of development will be abandoned. It may not be abandoned soon enough to avoid terrible consequences for China and the world, but the day will never arrive when half of China’s population owns cars.

On the other hand, the day
must
arrive when China’s people (and India’s and Brazil’s and Indonesia’s) live as well as Americans, or else there will be hell to pay. So the day may well arrive when more than half of all Americans don’t own cars either. The future, as usual, is not going to be like the present.

The “car” is merely a metaphor for industrial-era consumption, of course. I can actually imagine a decarbonized future in which everybody would still have their personal transportation device, known as a “car,” but the energy supply would have to come from entirely different sources. Meanwhile, in the real world, China became the world’s largest car manufacturer a decade early, in 2009, and it is building old-fashioned, petroleum-fuelled cars
.

So we’re still headed for the bad future of famines and wars, as the folks in the think tanks already realize
.

Last November, when Britain was having a public debate about the government’s intention to proceed with a whole new generation of nuclear weapons that would take the country into the mid-twenty-first century, I wrote a column mocking Defence Secretary John Reid for not even knowing why he wanted the weapons. How could he justify such a major expenditure and such a provocative policy, I asked, with the lame excuse that “It is impossible in most cases to predict where your enemy will come from … Whether we might have a nuclear enemy in fifteen years’ time is a difficult question to answer, other than to say history probably suggests we will.”

Perhaps I owe John Reid an apology: I think I now understand why he wanted the nuclear weapons, and why he was not willing to get specific about it.

Some time this month or next, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (
IPCC
) will send a draft report to the world’s governments that drastically raises its prediction of global warming increases to be expected this century. In its last report, the
IPCC
suggested that the average global temperature might increase as little as 1.5 degrees Celsius over the next hundred years. This would have a significant but still manageable impact in terms of wilder weather, coastal flooding and changing rainfall patterns.