If humans are wired to only fear short-term threats, forget about fighting climate change
- During WWII, 130,00 people were employed and US$23 billion spent in the race to build an atomic bomb
- We should be pouring at least as many resources into slowing down the break-up of glaciers and rise in sea levels, but we can’t seem to garner the same sense of urgency
I’m writing this on a plane to Greenland – well, actually, on a plane to Denmark, because there’s no way to get to Greenland by a civilian airline without going through Copenhagen first – and it has occurred to me (not for the first time) to wonder where everybody else is.
Worldwide there may be 1,000 scientists working on the “cryosphere”, the frozen parts of the planet, but their energies are divided among many different aspects of climate change: thawing permafrost releasing megatonnes of methane; loss of sea ice cover on the Arctic Ocean, why the Arctic is warming four times faster than the rest of the planet, etc.
How many people are working specifically on accelerating glacial flows? Maybe a hundred full-time scientists, if you’re feeling optimistic.
What holds glaciers back is the friction between the ice and the bottom. Warmer ocean currents are eating away at the base of the glaciers and effectively detaching them from the bottom, i.e. taking the brakes off.
The official Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forecasts no more than one metre of sea level rise by 2100. Many scientists think two metres is more likely, given predictable further warming even with rapid cuts to emissions. And if the entire, quite unstable West Antarctic Ice Sheet starts to slide into the sea, four metres.
A two-metre sea level rise would flood land that is home to a quarter of a billion people: in Asia, goodbye to Shanghai, Bangkok and Kolkata; in the US, farewell to Miami and New Orleans. At four metres, at least a billion people would be looking for new homes – and they wouldn’t be in the mood to take no for an answer.
However, there are just five scientists and engineers on this trip: an American, two Canadians, a Brit (who’s normally based at a Chinese university) and a Finn. They have a really promising idea for slowing down the glaciers and reducing the speed of sea level rise, and there should be 10 or 30 or 50 teams working on promising ideas.
Consider, for a moment, the Manhattan Project, which employed 130,000 people in 1942-45 to build the first atomic bombs. It cost about US$23 billion in today’s money, but nobody objected because they were afraid that the Germans might get The Bomb first. (In fact, the Germans weren’t even trying.)
No, they can’t, and I suspect our ancestors are to blame. All our ancestors were hunter-gatherers for at least 98 per cent of human history, and hunter-gatherers lived in the short term.
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They could react very fast to immediate and visible threats, but they could do nothing about longer-term challenges like changes in the climate or in animal migration routes, so they didn’t waste time worrying about them. We are their descendants, and that’s our default mode too.
What I’m suggesting, I’m afraid, is that there may be a sort of species-specific speed limit on how fast human societies can respond even to very big threats if they are slow-moving, impersonal and invisible. The Manhattan Project people were in the middle of a war against human enemies; we are not.
If there is such a speed limit, does that mean we are doomed? Who knows? How fast is fast enough? But the graduate schools are now full of people studying climate science, and despair is not a useful option.
Gwynne Dyer’s new book is “The Shortest History of War”