Part 2: What is to be done
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By William C. Shelton

(The opinions and views expressed in the commentaries of The Somerville Times belong solely to the authors of those commentaries and do not reflect the views or opinions of The Somerville Times, its staff or publishers)

The long-term climate forecast moved sharply toward catastrophic last week. Two research teams using different methods published evidence that melting of the Western Antarctic ice sheet now appears to be unstoppable. The water contained therein could, by itself, raise global sea levels by more than ten feet over the coming two hundred years.

This was the third big climate-change news event in as many weeks. In April, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released the third and last report of its fifth cycle. It focused on what is to be done. Exploring 1,200 scenarios for averting disaster, it recommended the cheapest and most effective of them.

The report shows that the best way to reduce catastrophic impacts is to abandon fossil fuels. It presents persuasive evidence that doing so would not precipitate the kind of economic chaos that climate-change deniers forecast. It calculates that moving from fossil fuels to renewables would reduce expected annual economic growth rates by only .06%.

While emphasizing the need for international cooperation and placing a price on carbon, the report disappointed liberals on several counts. It dismissed cap-and-trade as a policy that has not worked where it has been tried. Instead, nations should consider instituting a revenue-neutral carbon tax and eliminating government subsidies for fossil fuel production.

And it argues that fracking is a critical interim measure in transitioning from fossil fuels to renewables, but only if coal is abandoned. It’s my own view that the integral fast reactor is an inherently safe form of fission energy whose minimal risks are outweighed by the much greater risks of climate change.

The second news event came earlier this month with release of the 800-page National Climate Assessment. The Global Change Research Act of 1990 had mandated a report every four years, but the Bush Jr. administration defied the mandate.

The Assessment showed that climate change is already well underway and getting worse. The extreme weather events that we’ve seen in the Northeast U.S. will increase, decimating infrastructure. Billion-dollar weather events will continue in the Southeast. The growing season will lengthen in the Midwest, but with greater unpredictability regarding longer droughts and early frosts. Water shortage and fires will continue to ravage the Southwest, and insect infestations, the Northwest.

Receiving little notice was a Pentagon-commissioned report released last week, documenting the severe risk to national security posed by climate-change-driven political violence. It was overshadowed by the news from Antarctica.

In 1978, preeminent glaciologist John Mercer had warned that greenhouse gas release could cause ice sheet melting, posing “a threat of disaster.” He was, of course, ridiculed at the time.

Last week, NASA announced that the disaster is in its earliest stages. Thomas Wagner, who heads NASA’s polar ice programs said, “There’s nothing to stop it now. But you are still limited by the physics of how fast the ice can flow.”

The NASA announcement coincided with that of a paper to be published in the prestigious journal Science next month. It finds that the Thwaites Glacier, which holds back the Western Antarctic ice sheet, is in the early stages of collapse. What that will eventually do to the human world is beyond sobering.

The World Bank had issued a study last year of the ten global cities most vulnerable to sea level rise. Boston was in the top ten.

I optimistically subtitled this column “What is to be done” because the urgency is grim and the requirements are clear. But I might as easily have subtitled it “What is not being done.” Climate-change deniers continue to undermine political will, even though their rationalizations are disintegrating, one-by-one.

A common rationalization is that rising global temperatures are simply part of natural forces. There are three natural factors that cause long-term temperature fluctuations—solar radiation changes, volcanic emissions, natural oceanic-atmospheric cycles—and based only on natural forces, the earth should be cooling down rather than heating up.

The atmosphere above the blanket of greenhouse gases has been cooling since the 1970s, while below, it has been heating up. Solar heating would increase temperatures throughout the atmosphere.

Volcanic emissions account for only 1% of atmospheric carbon increases and 15% of methane increases.

Natural cycles like El Niño move heat from the ocean to the atmosphere, causing the air temperature to rise. La Niña does the reverse. Whichever direction heat moves, the total amount can’t increase by itself. Yet the ocean, atmosphere, and land are all heating up. Moreover, increases in oceanic temperatures are twenty times those of atmospheric, land, and ice combined.

Lacking credible evidence of their own, climate-change deniers allege that researchers are defecting from the 97% of climate scientists who say that climate change is real and caused by human activity. In fact, the reverse is true.

Take the example of University of California physics professor Richard Muller, who for years was a declared skeptic and critical of IPCC reports. He founded the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project. After intensive study, its dozen scientists concluded that temperature rise was actually more severe than the IPCC had estimated. Muller now says, “essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases.”

James Lawrence Powell, who served Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush for twelve years on the National Science Board, examined peer-reviewed scientific articles published over a one-year period. Of 2,258 articles, only one, published in the Herald of the Russian Academy of Sciences, rejected global warming.

Bowing to the inevitable, some deniers have shifted from arguing that anthropogenic climate change is not happening, to downplaying its effects. One conservative think tank report goes so far as to argue that, “the benefits of global warming greatly exceed the costs.”

Since scientific evidence discredits climate deniers, their continued denials are “faith based.” They have faith in deep thinkers like Senator James Imhoffe, Exxon chief Lee Raymond, and talk-show demagogue Rush Limbaugh.

It reminds me of Pascal’s wager. In writings that introduced decision theory and broke new ground in probability theory, Blaise Pascal argued that, given the enormous gain or loss associated with a just God’s existence or nonexistence, a rational person would live as though God does exist.

Unlike Pascal who lacked scientific evidence of God’s existence, we have geological layers of evidence for the existence of climate change. Given the enormous stakes, rational person would choose policies that hedge against climate catastrophe as cheaply as possible. You know that deniers’ intransigence is driven by ideology rather than evidence when they offer no back-up plan for the inconceivable possibility that they might be wrong.

Also different from Pascal’s considerations, future generations may not all be going to hell if humanity loses the climate-change wager. But as the International Monetary Fund’s Christine Legarde said at the World Economic Forum, they’ll be “roasted, toasted, fried, and grilled.”