Gwynne Dyer is the author of ‘Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World’s Climate Engineers’.
Interviewing 100 climate scientists — proper in-depth interviews, two cameras, lights, the lot — is a crash course in coping strategies.
Don’t get carried away by that notion. We’re still in the deepest trouble imaginable. But it has got a bit better: five years ago everybody was still pretending that we were going to fix all this just by cutting our greenhouse gas emissions.
It was a complete fantasy. Global emissions have not fallen in one single year since scientists first sounded the alarm in 1988. Nevertheless, the climate orthodoxy insisted that we could hold the warming down below 1.5 C until the end of the century by emissions cuts alone.
It may fall back a bit once the current El Niño warming ends. (That’s a natural cycle that dumps some extra heat into the system around once every three to seven years.)
But the El Niño peaked last December and is now finished, yet the northern hemisphere has had an even hotter spring than last year (the hottest on record).
The climate is chaotic, so this could still be a false alarm: both the air and ocean temperatures might yet return to the ‘new normal’. But that new ‘normal’ was already very high, so our normal emissions will drive us back up to plus-1.5 C for good by 2030 even if the ocean anomaly disappears.
So what can we do now?
The lost time hasn’t been entirely wasted. Solar and wind power have grown faster than anybody dared hope 10 years ago (though not yet fast enough to start cutting into the 82 per cent share of energy produced from fossil fuels).
But, most importantly, a generation of inventors, engineers and entrepreneurs foresaw that there would be a big demand for new approaches to curbing the warming once the public realized the urgency of the situation.
A profusion of those new ideas and technologies is now spilling out onto the market, and if enough of them fulfill their promise we might still get through this century without runaway global warming wrecking our future. But only on one condition.
We are already in the danger zone. Somewhere between 1.5 C hotter and 3 C hotter, most climate scientists believe, we will cross various ‘tipping points’ that trigger ‘feedbacks’: extra warming from non-human sources.
For example, parts of the Arctic are warming four times faster than the rest of the planet because the sea ice and the snow cover on land are melting. We caused the warming, so that’s our fault, but we could stop the melting if we stopped our emissions.
However, that melting exposes dark rock and open water that absorb sunlight instead of reflecting it back into space. This causes more warming, which is also ultimately our fault — but it’s not under our control. We can’t turn it off.
There are about a dozen feedbacks like that. We don’t know exactly when they will kick in, but scientists think we’ll trip them all at various points between here and plus 3 C.
The good news is that there are promising ideas for how to hold the temperature down, because they will probably be needed. It will be a long, hard slog, but we are not yet doomed.
Gwynne Dyer’s new book is Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World’s Climate Engineers. This column is the first of a two-part series.
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