The President made that comment in his weekly radio address. Now I accept the science behind climate change. Where I get annoyed is many of the assertions made to follow that up, such as “The world will be uninhabitable!” But his statement got me genuinely curious. Is there any scientific backing for what he said? Recognizing that what constitutes a great threat is an opinion to some extent, but I would think there should be at least some way to make a solid case that climate change is the greatest of threats.
Can’t we also make a case for nuclear proliferation? Widespread hunger? Religious and ethnic hatred? Great power politics that could lead to a catastrophic general war? More traditional environmental concerns like pollution or extinction of species(I realize global warming causes extinction but moreso than human encroachment on natural habitats?)
While climate change is a very serious problem, it seems to me that making it the #1 priority doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. But if someone can convince me that it’s a bigger problem than all of our other big problems, I’m open to being convinced.
That’s a really hard question to answer with complete objectivity because it’s so dependent on how you assess immediate threats versus inexorable long-term threats, and how you assess costs and allocate values. Is climate change “the greatest threat” if it might kill us in 200 years but a nuclear holocaust might kill us within the next 10? In that case, probably not. Is it the greatest threat if it will kill off much of the equatorial population and half of natural species and dangerously diminish natural diversity, but we in the temperate zone and the economical zone of wealth will manage to survive in some strange barren new world? There you have a value judgment of some kind.
Probably the biggest single issue is that nothing exactly like this has ever happened before in human history so there are large uncertainties about consequences and their costs. But similar things have happened before in the earth’s history – similar enough that they corroborate predictions of significant environmental catastrophe with major and direct human impacts such as vast changes in the ecosystem, loss of food supplies and habitats, droughts and wildfires in some areas and flooding in others, permanent changes in regional climates, and more extreme, violent weather with higher storm energies. Some of which can already be observed to be happening.
It’s interesting that you bring this up as I’m just now getting started on a new book that’s pertinent to the subject. Elizabeth Kolbert is a staff writer for the New Yorker who has been a great writer of articles and books on nature and climate change, and I was gratified to learn that this book was just awarded the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction on Monday.
It might help to have a list of problems you think are more important than climate change. Until we get that, all we can do is just guess at what you think is more threatening. Nuclear weapons? Russia? ISIS? Peak oil? Anti-vaccination? Asteroid impact? Creeping totalitarianism? None of those are likely to cause nearly as much disruption to human life on this planet as climate change.
Since the cold war ended, the risk of nuclear war has dropped significantly. But the damage due to climate change is much more certain.
I’d like to see what you think is more serious. Moving populations cause strife. It’s going to cost dollars and lives when suddenly the population of some coastal region needs to move inland.
I’d put asteroid impact at number one. Hard to top that, even if it’s a low probability event. Except for exotic cosmological phenomenon it’s the only thing that could realistically cause the extinction of the human race, or destroy large portions of the Earth’s surface.
It’s easy to conflate GW with other environmental concerns. I’m guessing particulate matter pollution kills more people directly than GW ever will. The problem is it’s hard to blame GW for specific events since it exacerbates things we’re already worried about, like disease, agricultural disruption, storms/droughts, wild fires, fresh water resources, and so on.
Ocean acidification is probably the worst potential effect, but there doesn’t seem to be much agreement on what will actually happen. I’m not sure how well humans can adapt to potentially widespread ocean foodchain collapse. Nations that derive large amounts of calories or wealth from the ocean could be looking at major overhauls.
Since nuclear holocaust doesn’t currently seem to be a high priority on any nation’s to-do list, climate change probably does take the top spot. It is conceivable that what we are doing will, at some point, cause the ecosystem to spin out of control and create a new Earth that humankind can’t survive on. The hope, of course, is that that’s a one in a million case and that it’s far more likely that we’ll have to start growing crops a little further from the equator than we are today, but otherwise there won’t be a large effect.
We don’t really know.
In another couple of decades, genocidal viruses and nanobots might be the bigger threat (the science of building very small things is probably the scariest thing we could do, and yet it gets very little mention), but at the moment, the technology isn’t good enough to have to worry.
AFAICU climate scientists expect that we will not go so far as the worst scenarios that they can picture. The point is that really alarming futures can be expected but the latest IPCC concentrated mostly on the scenarios were governments and industry would act more responsible regarding human emissions of global warming gases.
Hard to do when we have to deal with half of our government acting as if not even the most likely mild to hard to deal scenarios (that they are manageable if we act now) can be ignored.
What I also understand is that even in mild cases, like the ones that we are likely observing now, the point is that we can plan for mass movements of people when it gets more serious, but one can count on xenophobia and a few of the items that you mentioned to get worse thanks to the changes that global warming is likely to bring.
There are several studies that report that the Sirian mess was caused in part by climate change affecting the drought that then caused a few of the items that you mention there to get worse.
The point is that we are faced with an item that will affect those other cases when we could prevent it from becoming a larger factor that affects them.
Yes, it is the major threat today. Al Gore was right, we were wrong. The sooner we all get used to it, the better a chance we have to save not only our various national economies, but our nations.
Sorry, but that *is *the true answer, and you’re going to have to accept it.
Well, yeah, that’s the real root driver. But of its various effects, climate change is way, way up there. Total fisheries loss and oceanic acidification are arguably worse, but climate change is going to lead to a lot of displacement and war.
Heck, if overpopulation is what’s driving global warming, then I suggest religion is what’s driving overpopulation. More generically, religion and other cultural baggage that takes reproductive control away from women.
I think a good analogy is: you can stop at the doctor’s office this morning to get a radiation treatment for your mouth cancer, or you can make it to work on time. If you are late for work, there is a good chance you will be short on your bills this month, maybe even get fired, or worse, get your hours cut back. If you miss the radiation treatment, there is a good chance that they will not get all the cancer and you will be in the ground before next year.
Indeed, what makes the solution difficult is that the problem is, in human terms at least, relatively slow-moving while the solutions demand specific and timely actions. It’s like home maintenance with respect to a gradually deteriorating roof. You can always give it another year, and then maybe another, and another, while actually fixing it requires an immediate and visible cash outlay. OTOH, eventually it leaks or falls in and you wish you hadn’t been so shortsighted.
On a different subtopic, the overpopulation argument is pointless unless someone has a brilliant plan for immediately cutting it in half. And even then it’s not clear how helpful it would be, the problem being that we’re taking carbon that’s been sequestered in the earth for hundreds of millions of years and dumping it back into the atmosphere and the active carbon cycle, and the problem will persist as long as the amount of carbon being moved is a significant imbalance to the natural carbon cycle. It doesn’t take a particularly huge population to create that imbalance if they’re technologically enabled and energy-hungry. Arguing overpopulation is a lot like looking at medieval Europe where they dumped garbage and excrement into ditches, rivers, and lakes and even on the streets, and attributing the problem and resulting filth and disease to “overpopulation”. No, the problem was the existing population being really stupid in how they treated their environment.
As an orthodox Cecilian, I cannot doubt that ignorance is the number one threat to the planet. However, as beach front property becomes available in Arizona, the problem of ignorance about climate change is likely to be reduced significantly. And I expect firm action will be taken on the most prominent causes, illegal immigrants and welfare bums.
No. The history of the world is constant and dramatic climate change. The world has been both much hotter and colder than it is today. Currently we are in and ice age. Specifically an inter-glacial period of an ice age. Previously interglacials lasted about 10,000 years. It’s been about 10,000 years since the beginning of the current interglacial. Last time glaciers covers most of Canada, and much of New York and Pennsylvania.
If we succeeded at stopping climate change, that would be a dramatic departure from the natural history of the Earth. Climate change has driven the evolution of all life on Earth, including Homo sapiens.
None of that is to say we should be polluting our world, or making it toxic or ugly.
It’s just to say that climate change is natural, and probably inevitable. It’s just a question of what changes we want, and what are we willing to do to get them, or stop them from happening.
I think you need to clarify what you mean by greatest threat, and what is threatened when you say “the planet”.
Climate change has a very high chance of causing major problems for humanity. Coastlines will erode, cities will submerge, whole regions will become deserts, many species we rely on may go extinct. On the other hand, it seems very unlikely to actually cause the extinction of the human race. Lots of excess deaths, yes. Everyone dead, doubt it.
An asteroid strike or a global nuclear war, on the other hand, could credibly do that. It’s hard to say what the likelihood of those things is, but they seem more likely than human extinction due to climate change.
To get Homo sapiens we also had to depend on past climate change that very likely caused mass extinctions in the deep past.
Sure, I do think that Humanity will continue but we should not be so cavalier about how much damage we could endure, we should worry about the main forcing that is changing climate right now and it is coming from us. How narrow will be the bottle neck* that we are likely to encounter in the near future is what we should be worrying about.
*By bottleneck I mean the problem that we also have of this being a moving target, until we do get a handle with our emissions and control them the changes that we will have to deal with will either increase or reduce. IIUC the bottle neck we are talking about is that it is very possible that the change will not be as gradual as some skeptics claim, there is evidence that change can accelerate and local conditions under that state will be harder to predict.
In other words, expecting that we will be able to plant in higher latitudes in a short notice just as before is not likely, until emissions are controlled and a new more stable state is reached we will have serious trouble to predict were and when to use the expected new growing areas to be available, hence a bottleneck in food supply and the related troubles that brings. And I have not mentioned yet how much cropland will be lost with the ocean rise that also depends on how much we will end up emitting.
Superintelligent AI that views humanity the same way we view insects (as irrelevant at best and as a threat at worst) is the biggest threat to humanity in the 21st century.