The Garden of Science: Climate is a Long-term Issue, Human Disaster a Short-Term Probability

            Don't look now, but it appears likely that the human race is doomed. Having read "The Uninhabitable Earth" an article by climate-change explainer David Wallace Wells in a July issue of New York magazine, I am now able to put everything in perspective.

            Start with this so-called 'late summer' weather. A little cool, isn't it? Not my idea of real summer weather. Down in the sixties much of the time over for the last two weeks. And now that we're into mellow September, still three more weeks of summer technically according to the standard astronomical divisions of the solar-calendar, and I'm already looking around for key essentials in my winter wardrobe.

            Despite my desire to wind the seasonal clock back to the middle (or even beginning) of July and take these last two months over again, the worry is not that we've enjoyed (or tolerated) a cool summer, but that most of the world can look forward to warmer winters.

            In other words, warm is not good.

            This is counter-intuitive.

            I want to sit in nature's garden, sip something cold, and stare at the plants. Watch the sky. Track the many seemingly pointless (to us at least), patternless zigs and zags of the birds. Listen to the trees think. An occasional light breeze keeps the annoying insects off. The valuable, and intriguing insects, such as the honey bees are very welcome. I get photos of them every summer hopping in and out of big fact echinacea blooms and brushing against tiny bluish protrusions from the tips of the wild mint that joins the late summer crush around here.

            On my personal calendar August cannot have too many days. Quietly blessed and blooming afternoons slip into the hush of forever like a quiet nap. But too precious to sleep through. The cricket and cicada soundtrack of the early-starting evening. Not the songbirds calling end of day, but the humming appendages of largely invisible insects slipping into our consciousness from their undetectable hideouts. As the poets of Africa remind us: The grass is singing.

            But I'm living in the past. August serenades? Whoops, gones-ville.

            Now it's time for September songs.

            But apparently I am lamenting the wrong losses.

            The bigger story is that, temperature-wise, we're going up, up, up. And faster, and sooner, than we think.

            Wells's "The Uninhabitable Earth" has been fairly described as analyzing "worst-case scenarios," i.e., what is likely to happen to human life on earth if we do do nothing dramatic to contain our current greenhouse-gas emissions trajectory -- and, perhaps, even if we do. The article answers the question: how bad could it get?  

            The answer: Bad.

            The issue for the continuance of human civilizatin, or mere survival of some fragment of the species, is the time-clock -- or time bomb -- that operates in the planetary system of which we are a mere jonny-come-lately.

            Here's my favorite quote, the fact I will try to remember, on taking the long-view of climate change on Planet Earth:

             The Earth has experienced five mass extinctions before the one we are living through now, each so complete a slate-wiping of the evolutionary record it functioned as a resetting of the planetary clock, and many climate scientists will tell you they are the best analog for the ecological future we are diving headlong into. Unless you are a teenager, you probably read in your high-school textbooks that these extinctions were the result of asteroids. In fact, all but the one that killed the dinosaurs were caused by climate change produced by greenhouse gas. The most notorious was 252 million years ago; it began when carbon warmed the planet by five degrees, accelerated when that warming triggered the release of methane in the Arctic, and ended with 97 percent of all life on Earth dead. We are currently adding carbon to the atmosphere at a considerably faster rate; by most estimates, at least ten times faster. The rate is accelerating.

            Earth abides; people not so much.

            I'm listening to Peter Kater's "River," a musical piece evoking continuity, as I read this piece over. Frankly, I need the solace.

            The part about how "carbon warmed the planet by five degrees (celsius)... and ended with 97 percent of all life on Earth dead" particularly got my attention.

            Because as Wells goes on to point out, a five degrees elevation -- in an accelerated time frame because human beings are supplying the big oomph to the 'natural' forces that control climate by sending temps up and down -- is well within the possibilities of our very own here and now 'rapid climate change' super-crisis.

            If we have been following the Paris climate change agreement story, even distantly, we may know that the goal of the international treaty is holding global warming to a 2 percent increase. Wells's article analyzes the consequences of 4 percent and 8 percent increases, arguing that climate scientists offer the general public only the most modest estimates of their current global warming projections because they don't want to freak people out -- or governments -- and frankly they don't want to face the backlash of climate-deniers.

            So, in fact, the idiot know-nothings who currently possess the White House and most of the US government are already succeeding in keeping the true picture of what climate scientists thing may be in store for us from the vast majority of non-scientists. Here is some of that truth:   

Now two degrees is our goal, per the Paris climate accords, and experts give us only slim odds of hitting it. The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issues serial reports, often called the “gold standard” of climate research; the most recent one projects us to hit four degrees of warming by the beginning of the next century, should we stay the present course. But that’s just a median projection. The upper end of the probability curve runs as high as eight degrees — and the authors still haven’t figured out how to deal with permafrost melt...[The reports show] that temperature can shift as much as five degrees Celsius within thirteen years. The last time the planet was even four degrees warmer, Peter Brannen points out in The Ends of the World, his new history of the planet’s major extinction events, the oceans were hundreds of feet higher.

            Well there's another fact I may try to keep a grip on. Humankind may, relatively soon, be facing ocean levels "hundreds of feet higher." Yet in another part of his essay, Wells tells us that us rising sea level is merely one of many serious threats (such as "the end of food") humanity can expect to face.

            Here's where you can read the rest of this "worse than you think" analysis:

            http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html

             I'll indulge in only one other scare-fact -- we're all familiar with 'scare-stories' (that's how certain 'media' manipulate consumers such as the little-brained thing in the White House). But here's another 'scare-fact' about climate:

             Climate-change skeptics point out that the planet has warmed and cooled many times before. But the climate window that has allowed for human life is very narrow, even by the standards of planetary history.

             That is to say, through most of Planet Earth's history, temperatures on Earth's surface have been too hot, or too cold, to allow for the presence of human beings dwelling here.

            In terrestrial terms we were always here on a short lease.

            Suddenly I find myself more interested in those seemingly wacko proposals to set up artificial living environments on other planets. The climate science projections Wells presents here are:   

 what Stephen Hawking had in mind when he said, this spring, that the species needs to colonize other planets in the next century to survive, and what drove Elon Musk, last month, to unveil his plans to build a Mars habitat in 40 to 100 years.

             Mars? Some other so far undiscovered off-planet 'home' for humanity to inhabit?

            Some other living space, that is, from which our descendants can remember us. Or try to forget.

If you're interested in hearing other voices on this subject, here's an article that takes issue with some of Wells's conclusions.

... https://climatefeedback.org/evaluation/scientists-explain-what-new-york-magazine-article-on-the-uninhabitable-earth-gets-wrong-david-wallace-wells/

And here's an article that says he got his worrying forecast right:

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/7/11/15950966/climate-change-doom-journalism