Dead Species Walking: The “Battle” with Climate Change is Over

Text version:

All the information I mention here has already been made available several times at the Nature Bats Last blog, so I’ll skip the mundane task of listing the papers yet again. In addition, this information was presented via video on 18 September 2022 (albeit with poor sound quality). Not to worry: All relevant information can be found easily by using the search box at the Nature Bats Last blog.

The battle with climate change is over because, as with almost everything else, humans treated it as a battle. We’re warriors, apparently, preferring to fight instead of opting for love. Instead of treating the living planet and its organisms as relationships, we have treated every non-human being as a resource. According to departments of human resources, formerly called personnel departments, people have become resources, too. These profound changes occurred during my 62 years on Earth, consistent with the three-word motto of industrial civilization: Must go faster.

Herein I present a quick overview of abundant information I have shared previously. All of this information is based on the work of other scholars, largely because I reached the conclusion of abrupt, irreversible climate change leading to near-term human extinction after I had made profound sacrifices on behalf of the living planet. Had I known 15 years ago what I know today, I would still be on the campus of a major university living a life filled with privilege … being paid to think, if you can imagine that. Instead, my pursuit of right action in the absence of relevant information led to my departure from campus life, and then a coordinated defamation campaign that effectively removed me from the public service I was offering for no charge. This campaign caused nearly every friend and family member to conclude I’m a terrible person, thereby terminating most of the relationships in my life. As I’ve pointed out in this space previously, this is not about me. However, my erasure from public life will have the sad consequence of contributing to nearly eight billion people dying ignorant and confused as we continue to lose habitat for human animals on Earth.

First, the quick overview:

• Civilization is a heat engine, and reducing industrial activity will heat the planet even faster.
• Two degrees Celsius above the 1750 baseline never mattered. A much lower planetary temperature has already triggered many self-reinforcing feedback loops that have taken relevant climate-change actions out of our hands.
• Two degrees Celsius above the 1750 baseline is already behind us. The ongoing demands for you and me to reduce our emissions so that wealthy people can use the remaining fossil fuels on Earth will not prevent the temperature from rising to 1.5 C above the 1750 baseline. Ditto for 2 C.
• I’ll conclude with a little advice that I’ve given before: Live your life. Within the bounds of maintaining your integrity and treating others with respect, stop making personal sacrifices so that others can continue to exploit the living planet. Get out there. Live!

Some Details

Civilization is a heat engine, as pointed out in six peer-reviewed papers authored or co-authored by professor Tim Garrett at the University of Utah. It matters not whether we power civilization with coal or solar panels: It’s still a heat engine. In a vexing paradox, reducing industrial activity by as little as 20% will cause a 1-degree Celsius spike in global-average temperature that will cause loss of habitat for most life on Earth within a very short period of time. This latter tidbit comes from a paper in the peer-reviewed journal JGR Atmospheres written by Hiram Levy II and colleagues and published on 18 January 2013. Complete cessation of industrial activity will trigger a 55% increase in global-average temperature in the wake of aerosols falling out of the atmosphere. As professor James Hansen has said in many interviews and presentations, the aerosols fall out of the atmosphere in about 5 days. As a paper in the 15 June 2021 issue of Nature Communications indicates, the 55% increase in global-average temperature will be particularly evident on land, where most of us live. Specifically, the temperature will rise 133% over land.

Despite what you continue to hear from people ignorant or lying about climate science, 2 C never mattered. Furthermore, we already crossed the 2 C Rubicon. The predecessor to the IPCC, the Advisory Group on Greenhouse Gases, concluded during the final year of its existence the following: “Beyond 1 degree C may elicit rapid, unpredictable and non-linear responses that could lead to extensive ecosystem damage.” Sure enough, that already happened, probably before the Advisory Group on Greenhouse Gases issued their report in October 1985. According to climate-science speaker and writer David Spratt, self-reinforcing feedback loops were triggered at 0.5 degrees C above the 1750 baseline. Spratt shared this information in a presentation delivered during October 2014 titled, Dangerous Climate Change: Myths & Realities. I have shared some of the many self-reinforcing feedback loops already behind us in my 2021 and 2022 peer-reviewed publications. Wedged between reports from the Advisory Group on Greenhouse Gases and the IPCC, a peer-reviewed paper in the 10 February 2009 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded climate change was irreversible. That paper, titled, “Irreversible climate change due to carbon dioxide emissions,” concluded climate change is irreversible for the next 1,000 years based on carbon dioxide alone. In other words, most climate scientists have been lying about our ability to reverse climate change even longer than many people watching this video have even known there was such a phenomenon as anthropogenic climate change.

The IPCC finally admitted climate change is irreversible in its 24 September 2019 report, IPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate: “Ocean acidification and deoxygenation, ice sheet and glacier mass loss, and permafrost degradation are expected to be irreversible on time scales relevant to human societies and ecosystems.”

I’ll quote again from the ultra-conservative political body known as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC concluded the following in its 8 October 2018 report, Global Warming of 1.5^o: “These global-level rates of human-driven change far exceed the rates of change driven by geophysical or biosphere forces that have altered the Earth System trajectory in the past …; even abrupt geophysical events do not approach current rates of human-driven change.”

In other words, in two reports published less than a year apart, the IPCC concluded climate change is extremely abrupt—more abrupt that at any other time in planetary history—and also irreversible. You’ll rarely find this information reported by the corporate media. You’ll essentially neverfind paid climate scientists admitting that even the IPCC has concluded climate change is abrupt or irreversible. It’s both.

Not only did 2 C not matter, but we crossed the 2 C Rubicon years ago. As renowned professor Andrew Glikson wrote in his October 9th, 2020 book, The Event Horizon, “During the Anthropocene greenhouse gas forcing has risen by more than 2 watts per square meter, equivalent to >2 degrees C above pre-industrial temperatures, which constitutes an abrupt event over a period not much longer than a lifetime.” Let’s conservatively assume the current planetary temperature, so far, is only 2 C above the 1750 baseline. In that case, the global-average temperature resulting from loss of aerosol masking will hit about 4.7 C within a few days after aerosol masking is lost. Let’s conservatively assume the temperature rise occurs during the winter in the Norther Hemisphere, and therefore the full impacts are not realized until the following spring and summer. Nonetheless, this exceptionally rapid rise in global-average temperature will cause the extinction of our species, albeit not next Tuesday. The follow-on effects, including the rapid increase in global-average temperature leading to the acceleration of dozens of self-reinforcing feedback loops, will take Earth quickly to the 5- to 6-degree Celsius temperature rise sufficient to cause the extinction of all life.

That 5 or 6 degrees above the 1750 baseline will cause the extinction of all life on Earth comes from an open-access, peer-reviewed paper I’ve mentioned several times in this space. I refer specifically to a 13 November 2018 paper written by Strona and Bradshaw in Scientific Reports. Titled, “Co-extinctions annihilate planetary life during extreme environmental change,” the paper points out that a global-average temperate increase of 5-6 C above the 1750 baseline within a few centuries will doom to extinction all life on Earth. As ecologists Strona and Bradshaw reported in their paper, the ability to adapt to environmental change is critical for the continued persistence of all species here on Earth. The ability to adapt to such rapid changes applies to all organisms, including human animals.

At least eight species in the genus Homo have already gone extinct, primarily from rapid changes in the temperature of Earth. If Homo sapiens turns out to be as “special” as the previous species in our genus, then we, too, will soon disappear.

Another relevant tidbit: We have triggered many self-reinforcing feedback loops, only one of which is required for climate change to be irreversible. Even the politically motivated IPCC finally admitted climate change was irreversible three years ago. Furthermore, the IPCC admitted climate change is more abrupt than at any time in planetary history about four years ago. As every conservation biologist knows—and apparently nobody else—the rate of environmental change is the most important factor contributing to loss of habitat and therefore extinction.

Finally, I turn again to the 2007 film No Country for Old Men. My favorite line came from actor Barry Corbin during the only scene in which he appeared in this film: “You can’t stop what’s coming. It ain’t all waiting on you. That’s vanity.”

No, you can’t stop what’s coming. Neither can I, as much as I wish otherwise. What we can do is live with integrity. I’d recommend it. We can also experience joy by bringing happiness to other people in our lives. I’d recommend that, too. Share the love. While you’re at it, please share this information as widely as you can. Everybody deserves to know that our extinction draws near.