What I’ve Learned Writing About Climate Change on Medium
Civilization is going down, just how far remains to be seen
I’ve written a lot about climate change since arriving here on Medium in 2020. Indeed, it’s fair to say it has become my primary obsession. Among the 75 posts I have written since 2020, eleven have been devoted to climate change, its causes, and its implications for human civilization. In this post, I’m going to review and summarize them all, grouped into two general categories:
- Climate change basics
- How climate is changing the world
1. Climate Change Basics
As with my writing on politics, I began my study of climate change with a series of posts modestly titled “The Future of Humanity”, in which I tried to define the problem. I visualized our dilemma as a Venn diagram with three overlapping circles representing three overlapping crises: an ecological crisis, an economic crisis, and a political crisis. I then looked at the paradox of fossil fuels and the question of whether, how, and by when they might be replaced by alternative energy sources. I concluded that they can be replaced, but only with a decrease in the energy intensity we enjoy from fossil fuels today. There will be an energy descent.
Where We Are and How We Got Here The Future of Humanity, Part 1
When I began this series in November 2022, we were still in the depths of post-COVID recovery. Here I described the three intersecting crises as they appeared at the time. All three have gotten worse in the subsequent year and a half. I also reprinted this brilliant graphic by UCSD physicist Tom Murphy that I think captures our current dilemma and makes clear that the energy peak from which we are about to fall is far from “normal” … not when you take a long-term perspective on human history:
I summarized the dilemma we face with regard to fossil fuels:
Either we keep burning fossil fuels, in which case we cook the planet, melt the ice caps, and eventually make the Earth uninhabitable for humans. Or we stop burning fossil fuels, in which case we must create a new energy regime based on renewable sources that may or may not be able to power the civilization and population occupying the planet today.
Fossil Fuels … Can’t Live with ’Em, Can We Live Without ‘Em? The Future of Humanity, Part 2
The dilemma humanity faces with regard to fossil fuels is this: Either we continue burning fossil fuels and risk heating the planet to potentially unsurvivable levels, or we stop burning fossil fuels and risk collapsing of the global economy and ending capitalism as we know it.
Part 2 of this series looks at the many ways our modern civilization is dependent on the dense energy packed into fossil fuels. It also notes how these finite energy sources are depleting over time due to declining accessibility (the easy-to-extract stuff was used up decades ago), decreasing quality, and increasing cost to extract and process. I summarize the dilemma we face as follows:
The irony of our time is that we must continue to burn fossil fuels in order to build the renewable energy infrastructure we need to stop burning fossil fuels. As a consequence, it looks like global warming is not a problem the energy transition will solve. Rather, it appears to be a cost the energy transition will impose.
Can Renewable Energy Power a Civilization Built on Fossil Fuels? The Future of Humanity, Part 3
The short answer is NO. We have made great strides in transitioning electricity generation (and storage) in some locations (the post includes a case study of solar and wind energy in California). But across the world as a whole, only about 20% of the humanity’s energy is delivered in the form of electricity. The other 80% powers sectors like industrial manufacturing (e.g., steel and cement production), transportation (beyond passenger cars, including aviation and shipping), and construction (both new construction and retrofitting). Despite some encouraging progress in electrifying these sectors, they remain difficult to transition away from fossil fuels, given the short timeframe we have left to limit global warming to a survivable level.
The longer answer:
… the most reasonable conclusion at this point is that we can indeed transition at least some of our energy production away from fossil fuels, but probably not enough to recreate the global energy capacity we enjoy today thanks to fossil fuels. At the same time, we have missed our chance to hold the global mean temperature to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels.
Childhood’s End The Future of Humanity, Part 4
Sci-fi fans will recognize the nod to Arthur C. Clarke. In this case, the childhood in question is our 10,000-year history of living under a climate regime that was uniquely stable and hospitable to the needs of humans. Although not included in the post, this graphic tells the tale (that’s us, under the big red arrow):
Our childhood of relative stability is now coming to an end as we anticipate human-caused global warming increasing average global temperatures to 2–4°C above preindustrial levels (if not higher), catapulting the planet into a climate regime unseen since the late Pleistocene and never experienced by humans.
Part 4 presents an overview of the risks such a temperature rise is likely to impose on the planet and its occupants (yes, including us). First-order effects are direct impacts of a hotter, more volatile world on human civilization and the biosphere, such as heatwaves and radically changing rainfall and snowfall patterns. Second-order effects are additional consequences arising from first-order effects, including interactions, cascades, and tipping points. They include sea level rise, fresh water scarcity, agricultural shortages, and possibly irreversible ecosystem state-changes.
It’s a depressing tale, but this is the world we are creating for ourselves and the planet.
The Coffin in the Room: Catastrophic Impacts on Human Population The Future of Humanity, Part 5
Like the proverbial elephant in the room, the coffin in the room is the issue everybody knows is there, but nobody wants to talk about — population collapse.
The first point made in this post is the observation that our climate models are not coupled with our population models, so we really have no idea how damaging to the human population our emerging climate crisis is going to be.
The climate models used in the IPCC reports only include population as an input variable, not as an output variable. They predict climate changes based (in part) on a given level of population (usually taken from those UN projections), but they do not predict population changes based on a given level of global warming. In other words, the population and climate models are not bidirectionally coupled (source).
When some scientists have shown a willingness to address this issue, informally if not formally in their modeling work, the responses from the media and other scientists have been swift and condemnatory. I recount some anecdotes in the post.
I then list several (informal) estimates of what a sustainable population of humans in this planet might be, given not only climate change but also the potential for breaching other planetary boundaries that define the planet’s carrying capacity. The estimates are sobering, to say the least:
- Planetary Boundaries project: Earth’s resources might support only one-half to one-sixth of the world’s current population.
- William Rees: The long-term carrying capacity of Earth is between one billion and three billion people, depending on technology and standards of living.
- Paul Ehrlich: Optimum human population size is is likely to fall somewhere between 1.5 billion and 2 billion people.
- Johan Rockström: It’s difficult to see how we could accommodate eight billion people or maybe even half of that.
The post also contains a critique of the argument that a “demographic transition” can bring less developed countries in the Global South up to the level of material wellbeing and resource consumption enjoyed by the Global North today.
My conclusion:
The potential for catastrophic loss of human life due to climate change is indeed the coffin in the room. But it continues to be ignored, denied, or diminished. Climate scientists have firmly established that more people consume more resources, burn more fossil fuels, produce more greenhouse gases, raise global temperatures, and increase the risk of irreversible climate tipping points. But they have been more reticent to document and publicize how severely global warming might in turn decimate populations around the world, starting with the regions that will initially experience the full brunt of a 2–4°C hotter world, but spreading quickly to the rest of the world as well.
The End We Start From The Future of Humanity, Part 6
Part 6 of this series looks both backward and forward. Looking back, it asks, how did we get here? Looking forward, it asks, given where we are, given what we’ve done, what comes next?
I identify several reasons why humanity has been unable to halt its slide into climate catastrophe, but emphasizes two factors that are most determinative. The first is the very likely unwillingness of the relatively rich citizens of the Global North to voluntarily accept restrictions on their consumption of resources in order to curb global warming, resource depletion, and ecological damage. The consensus regarding this possibility is essentially “when pigs fly”.
The second factor is in many ways a source of the first — rightwing political resistance:
… our efforts to change course have faced and will continue to face unrelenting and powerful opposition from political parties on the authoritarian right, particularly the American Republican Party. These parties represent the interests of those who continue to profit (or expect to continue to profit) from the status quo, one fiscal quarter at a time.
As long as government action remains paralyzed due to resistance and denial, we will continue along the path we have been following for decades. But, as I and many others have argued incessantly, that path contains its own contradictions, and will inevitably end in collapse, despite whatever fantasies those in power continue to believe. Indeed, those fantasies will, if anything, accelerate and deepen the collapse, as unintended consequences of fantasy-based policies overwhelm and bring to a grinding halt whatever is left of economic growth and capitalist business-as-usual.
This post ends with a description of how collapse might proceed. I won’t repeat the sequence here, but suggest that interested readers check out the more recent and updated sequence detailed in my more recent post, “What Are We Talking About When We Talk About Collapse”.
A Post-Carbon Future for Humanity? The Future of Humanity, Part 7
This final post in my “Future of Humanity” series looks deeper into our post-carbon future. Based on the evidence and trends reviewed in the previous six posts, it asks what kind (and size) of civilization we can expect to remain after humanity emerges on the other side of the true and final End of Oil. I illustrate the options by returning to a slightly modified version of the Tom Murphy graphic I introduced in Part 1:
The three arrows shooting off to the right represent three levels of energy capacity humanity might be able to muster after the depletion or abandonment of fossil fuels later this century.
- The red dotted arrow represents what might be called the utopian dream of an energy transition that gives us just as much energy — and as much complexity — as we have today, maybe more. We know this is an impossible dream, built on a fundamental misunderstanding of sustainability and natural resource constraints on a finite planet, but it does still sell books (source, source, source).
- The green dotted arrow represents a “moderate simplification” outcome. It is where we might end up if we manage to transition some, but not all, of our current dependence on fossil fuels to renewable energy sources. I speculate that this world could look something like a localized version of 1950s America, just with much more heat. “Radical hope” might get us here, if we continue to develop and deploy alternative energy solutions in sectors where fossil fuels are still dominant today.
- The black dotted arrow represents a “radical simplification” outcome, one in which we exit the Age of Oil with few or no scalable alternatives to fossil fuels in place. This outcome could look more like 1850s America, or the “Wood World” future envisioned by Alice Friedemann. I fear that embracing “radical acceptance” might lead us to this outcome. It would be a shame if by “radically accepting” our fate, we prematurely abandoned promising ideas that might make the post-carbon world more livable than it otherwise would be.
In conclusion, I argue that the post-carbon world we are heading toward is likely to be characterized by five major features: fewer people, smaller and much simpler communities and social organizations, more localized sourcing of local needs accompanied by more fragmented political power, much greater attention to sustainability, and a deep sense of guilt, as our descendants come to terms with the death and destruction we have so heedlessly and unnecessarily inflicted on the planet and all its inhabitants.
2. How Climate Is Changing the World
Ten facts humanity must face if it wants to survive on a livable planet
For the tl;dr folks among us who might not want to wade through a 7-part series on the fate of humanity, I provided this shorter summary, boiling things down to 10 statements — statements so well-documented that I believe we can plausibly call them facts — that encapsulate the challenges we now face. Here they are:
Fact 1: We have built a massively unsustainable consumption-driven civilization on the backs of a uniquely powerful energy source — fossil fuels — that was discovered, exploited, and will be depleted within a nano-moment of planetary history: less than 300 years.
Fact 2: We know fossil fuels are poisoning our atmosphere, but we also know they are becoming more difficult and expensive to obtain. Within the next several decades, they will no longer be available.
Fact 3: While we have made some significant progress in transitioning from fossil fuels to renewable energy substitutes, these gains have generally been limited to the production of electricity, which powers only about 20% of the world’s energy needs. They are also occurring very unevenly across the globe.
Fact 4: In order to transition the other 80% of global energy that derives from fossil fuels, we will have to invent many new technologies that do not exist today.
Fact 5: How long and how much we continue to burn fossil fuels will determine how hot the planet will get. Only when we stop burning fossil fuels will global temperatures stop increasing.
Fact 6: It’s not just climate change we’re facing, it’s climate change plus resource depletion.
Fact 7: Our consumption of the planet’s finite resources is in overshoot: we are consuming more than the planet is capable of replenishing.
Fact 8 : Our overconsumption of the planet’s resources is very unequally distributed. The vast majority of consumption occurs in the rich global North, while much of the global South struggles to meet the most basic consumption needs of its citizens.
Fact 9: Given our failure to curb greenhouse gas emissions, much of this century’s warming is already baked-in. The infrastructure-poor South will suffer first and most, but its loss of productive capacity will quickly boomerang back on the wealthy North as well.
Fact 10: Given Facts 1–9, some amount of energy descent from our fossil-fuel peak seems inevitable.
These 10 facts essentially encapsulate the polycrisis humanity has created for itself.
Why Looking at Average Temperatures Is a Bad Way to Think About Climate Change: Part 1
The point of this post and its follow-on (Part 2) is captured in the opening graphic:
We tend to think of climate change in terms of average temperatures, because that’s how the media and climate activists usually package our climate information. Presumably, that’s the most succinct way to tell us how hot it’s getting. But averages are simply arbitrary points that summarize the middle of a range of temperatures. When it comes to climate change, it’s much more important to concentrate on the extremes, at both ends of the range of temperatures, because that’s where the action is going to be:
… it’s not the average surface temperature that’s going to bring down our global economy, and eventually our fossil-fuel-dependent civilization, it’s the extreme temperatures — and particularly where and when those extreme temperatures appear — that will determine how and at what pace climate change and its partner in crime, resource depletion, will undermine and eventually destroy what we now mistakenly perceive as normalcy.
The post then goes on to describe some of the dangerous extremes that were already beginning to appear in 2023. My conclusion:
It’s extreme temperatures, not averages, that we need to pay attention to. They tell us where and when climate crises are likely to appear first, with what consequences. Initial hotspots are where our political and economic leaders must focus if they want to protect vulnerable human populations, including that subpopulation to which I used to belong, the one filled with people still thinking “Two degrees hotter? I can live with that!”
Why Looking at Average Temperatures Is a Bad Way to Think About Climate Change: Part 2
Part 2 of this examination of averages vs. extreme temperatures looks at how the wide range and highly uneven distribution of climate impacts around the planet is going to affect how humanity responds to the climate crisis it has created. This issue has been raised by the IPCC:
“As the climate moves away from its past and current states, we will experience extreme events that are unprecedented, either in magnitude, frequency, timing or location. The frequency of these unprecedented extreme events will rise with increasing global warming. Additionally, the combined occurrence of multiple unprecedented extremes may result in large and unprecedented impacts.” (IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, ch. 11, p. 1610)
The post then looks at when and where climate thresholds are likely to be breached first, with what effects. It summarizes local and regional vulnerabilities for several types of extreme climate events: heatwaves, floods, droughts, wildfires, breadbasket failures, and sea level rise.
In summary, certain countries pop up again and again in these depictions of when and where climate change is likely to hit first. Primarily, these countries are in Asia, Africa, and Central and South America. The risks they face often include extremes at both ends of the dry/wet and hot/cold spectrums: deadly heat, drought, and water shortages in the hot months, cold snaps, excess precipitation, and flooding in the cold months. The two most populous countries on the planet — China and India — both share these features. … Similar conditions threaten Brazil, home of the Amazon rainforest, the greatest carbon sink in the world, which is highly vulnerable to temperature increases, wildfires, and flooding (source). Other possible early hotspots can be found in Mexico, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. All of these countries play nontrivial roles in global supply chains, but are relatively poor and have weak infrastructures in place for protecting their populations against the worst extremes that climate change has in store for them.
Why Is the Global North Sleepwalking into Climate Catastrophe?
My examination of extreme temperatures in the previous two posts necessarily focused on the Global South, because that is where global warming is hitting first and most disruptively. But this raises another question: why do populations in the Global North seem so uninterested, even indifferent, to the suffering that is beginning to appear around the world? I created a simple graphic that I think captures the essence of why this is still the case:
What does it take for a disaster to become newsworthy in America? This post looks at an intriguing study done in 2007 to answer that question. The post contains the details, but the bottom line finding of the study was that two factors determined how much coverage a disaster got in American mainstream media: first, how “spectacular” the event was (unexpected, visually compelling, physically damaging) and second, where it was located (the closer to “home”, that is, New York City, the greater the coverage).
Combining those two factors, the authors were able to calculate how many deaths were needed to trigger mainstream media coverage for different categories of disasters. Looking at 5,000 natural disasters occurring between 1968 and 2002, they found that volcanos and earthquakes were most likely to be covered, even if inflicting only one or two deaths. Disasters commonly associated with climate change required many more deaths to become newsworthy: over 1,600 for epidemics, 2,300 for droughts, and 3,100 for cold waves. Least likely to get covered were food shortages, which required almost 40,000 deaths before they received equivalent coverage.
Today, the worst climate change disasters are slow-moving, hardly “spectacular” events occurring, for the most part, far away from the center of the American media universe. What will it take to move climate change to the forefront of public concerns? The outlook is not encouraging:
My opinion is that it’s going to take a massive climate-driven disaster that the world’s media simply can’t ignore or frame as a fixable one-off. As we saw in my last post, that event is likely to take place in Asia, Africa, or South America, not in North America or Europe. As a “foreign event”, it will have to be of a magnitude that the indifferent in the American public can’t ignore and the dismissive in the conservative minority can’t write off as a liberal conspiracy.
That’s it. Hardly a pretty picture. When I started looking seriously at climate change, I was hoping it might be a “solvable” problem. I have since come to see it not as a problem with a solution, but rather as a condition with an outcome … actually, lots of outcomes. Further, these outcomes will be made worse or less worse (I can’t in good conscious say “better”) by every decision we make, from individual choices about consumption to national and supranational decisions about supporting or not supporting massive investments in post-carbon energy sources. My overall conclusion:
The damage we have already inflicted on the planet is a damning indictment of humans as a species. The damage we are going to inflict over the next 100 years will be even worse. Millions, possibly billions, of us are going to die as climate disasters and hothouse conditions render large areas of the planet unlivable for humans. We have wiped out other species, poisoned the land and water, destroyed the planet’s carbon sinks, and triggered global temperatures unseen in 125,000 years (source). Yet we are so invested in our current profligate ways that we cannot stop ourselves from continuing on our path of over-consumption and ecological destruction. So we will have to be stopped by the very physical limits we refuse to acknowledge as real, the finite capacities of planet Earth. (source: “The Future of Humanity: Part 7”)
