It's hard to get worked up about climate change, isn't it? A ten-year window to avoid probably locking in potentially catastropic warming, making the loss of polar ice and the melting of the permafrost a near certainty?1 No biggie.
I mean, sure, if we could flick a switch and decarbonize everything, stop logging the rainforests, switch over to clean, human-scale transport systems, insulate our houses a bit better, replace meat with low-impact, straight-from-the-air synthetic meat and maybe reduce the amount of commuting we have to do, we'd all vote for that (well, not actually vote for it, but be pleased if it happened). But, in practice, it all seems terribly hard---a bit overwhelming, even---and there more pressing things like, you know, (waves hands, expansively) everything else. Sure, it would be nice to send a message that we care this stuff when we vote, but at the end of the day, reducing our carbon emissions isn't going to pay the rising energy bills---amirite?---and anyway nothing Britain does really matters in the scheme of things because it's China and the the US and all these populous big countries that really need change to make the world more bearable for our children and, er, their children and, er, well everyone else.
Besides, it's all a bit overblown isn't it? I mean, would Britain being a bit warmer be so bad? Vineyards in York? Sitting out on the Boulevards of Edinburgh sipping a cool beveridge and shooting the breeze (if you can still remember what a breeze is, eh?)?
Imagine a Meteor
Imagine there were a large meteor headed for the Earth that was projected to make impact, with 90% probability, and wipe out anything from 30% to 80% of human life on Earth, with an outside chance of ending it all---a so-called extinction-level event. (Yes, Deep Impact, but with a longer time horizon and no Morgan Freeman as President.) But the boffins tell us we have ten years to develop a gismo to deflect it so that it probably won't hit us at all. (We might not even have to send Robert Duvall or Brice Willis or Ben Affleck up to nuke the sucker.) Every day, we'd have pictures of the rocky snowball of doom hurtling towards us and we'd decide---surely we'd decide?---to do whatever it takes™ to fend off this terrifying evil.
Climate change doesn't feel like that to most people, however strong you make the parallels.
You can't really see it (even when Canada's on fire or India's underwater or UK airport runways are melting). There've always been hot spells and storms and hundred-year events and temperature records (though the hundred-year events didn't come along as often in the past).
There's this slighlty messed-up idea (at least in Britain) that we'd quite like warmer weather.
There's the feeling of helplessness and the weird dynamic where each climate hostile action one of us takes is just a drop in the ocean and that it's everyone else's actions that really determine the fate of the climate, not mine. We get clearly perceived ("intense") personal benefits from driving, flying, running the patio heater or eating a really good steak, whereas if we refrain from those our individual sacrifices don't have any real impact.2 3
And on top of that, it all sounds so shrill and improbable. Little old humans changing the very atmosphere we breathe? Wiping out species as fast, maybe, as in the mass extinction events? Making irreversible changes like melting the icecaps? Resource wars. Climate refugees? Hundred-year events every year or two? Really, it would be more British just to say "it's possible it's going to get slightly uncomfortably hot, but if it does, I shall consider removing my waistcoat."
Why am I worked up about this?
I think I probably have an unusually large capacity for getting worried and staying worried than most people. Or if you prefer, I scare easily and stay scared.
I think I first started really worrying about the environment when I read Rachel Carson's Silent Spring]. I'm not sure when that was, but it may well have been around 1985, when I was perhaps 20 years old. I'm pretty sure I'd previosly read Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth, which discusses the aftermath of nuclear war, and probably Harris & Paxman's A Higher Form of Killing which concerns chemical and biological weapons, and both of those books left me highly concerned about the deliberate use of what we now seem to call weapons of mass destruction. But Silent Spring raised a different kind of problem---that of humanity inadvertantly wreaking havoc on crucial Earth Systems on which we depend for life. As far as I recall, climate change didn't even feature in Silent Spring (she was more specifically concerned with species loss and related issues). But the book was extremely powerful and laid the foundation for a lifetime as an environmentalist.
My other perspectives come more from physics and mathematics, which makes me very concerned about non-linearity, feed-back effects and tipping points.
Mathematicians use the term linearity to refer to two main things in cause-and-effect relatinoships. One is proportionality: that if you change an input 10%, that will change the output by 10%. (A good tap might let out 10% more water if you turn it 10% further.) Things are smooth and predictable and small changes in inputs lead to small changes in outputs, and large input chages cause large output changes. The other aspect of linearity concerns how to different inputs affect the output in combination. In linear systems, the effect of changing two different inputs is just the sum of the changes from each input individually. So if a mixer tap were linear with respect to the hot and cold controls, and you moved the hot top from H1 and H2, changed the temperature from T1 to T2, and moving the cold tap from C1 to C2 moved it from T1 to T3, moving both taps to the new positions would change the temperature to T2 + (T3 - T1) (or T1 + (T2 - T1) + (T3 - T1)). Real plumbing systems often achieve neither of these ideals, with tiny movements of a tap often resulting in enormous changes to the flow, and the result of changing the hot and cold taps being quite hard to predict.
Although physicists mathematicians love to model real-world systems as linear (because linear systems are simply for calculation), and although many systems do have domains in which relationships are approximately linear, there are countless natural systems that are highly non-linear. A relevant example is heating water. If you heat ice below 0ºC, as you add energy, its temperature rises fairly linearly until it gets to zero. When it gets to 0ºC, as well all know, it starts to melt (an example of something physicists call a phase transition). You can carry on adding heat energy for quite a long time, but instead of raising the temperature of the ice, the energy gradually breaks the bonds that lock the water in the form of solid ice. After phase transition is complete, further energy again raises the temperature (though with a different constant of proportionality.
As well as non-proportional relationships, nature is also full of non-additive relationships (the other feature of linear systems).
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Doesn't this sound weak? probably locking in. potentially catastrophic. It's not how a tabloid subeditor would write it, is it? How much stronger would this be: Ten years to avoid locking in catastropic warming, melting icecaps and permafrost. Much better. ↩︎
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Of course, Edmund Burke said "Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little." But that was in the eighteenth century and doesn't really capture the zeitgeist, does it? ↩︎
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This is often referred to in environmental circle as the tragedy of the commons: my litter hardly contributes anything to litter in the park and my own doesn't bother me in the slightest: it's everyone else's litter that's the problem. I have also previously called this the Planetary Prisoner's Dilemma, with reference to the game-theory example known as Prisoner's Dilemma. Here two players each have to choose (independently) whether to cooperate or defect. The payoff matrix is such that the best outcome for the pair is for them both to cooperate (highest total payoff, and equal for them both), the worst is for them both to defect (lowest/most negative payoff, again equal for them both) but if one cooperates and one defects the cooperator gets a very bad payoff and the defector gets a good payoff. The numbers in the payoff matrix ensure that each player gets a better outcome from defecting than from cooperating whatever the other player does (even though they do better, overall, if they both cooperate and worst of all if they both defect), which acts as a strong encouragement to defection. ↩︎