By Les Grady
December 27, 2020
As part of the service, Linda Dove read RUBAIYAT FOR PLANET EARTH.
So, what’s an apocaloptimist? The urban dictionary definition is “someone who knows it’s all going to hell, but believes it’ll turn out OK,” with “it” being the country, the environment, humanity, or something else. For me, it’s the climate.
I’m an engineer, and most engineers are, by nature, optimists. We solve problems, which requires optimism. If a problem is so large and complicated that it’s hard to be optimistic about its solution, we break it down into its component parts, for which solutions can be found, thereby retaining our optimism.
When I first became an advocate for solving the climate crisis, around 14 years ago, I was terribly naïve, because like Dr. Spock on Star Trek, I thought that logic and facts would rule the day. That if I could explain the science in clear and logical terms, people would accept the fact that the developed world’s fossil-fuel driven economic system was causing the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere to increase, thereby causing Earth to warm. Furthermore, that they would see the obvious solution – stop putting fossil CO2 into the atmosphere and deploy systems to take some of it back out. Boy, was I deluded.
So, are we facing an apocalypse with the climate?
For thousands of years, atmospheric CO2 levels were around 280 ppm. Today, they are at 414 and will continue to climb until net emissions are zero. Unfortunately, except for a slight downturn this year because of the pandemic, global emission rates are still increasing. Furthermore, CO2 stays in the atmosphere for hundreds of years and won’t decline until we do something to remove it. Because of that CO2, Earth has seen a global average temperature increase of 2°F since the industrial revolution. Furthermore, the temperature will continue to rise until atmospheric CO2 levels are decreased. To stabilize at today’s temperature, CO2 would have to be decreased to 350 ppm, but at this point it’s still going up.
The signers of the Paris Climate Agreement pledged to limit Earth’s average temperature increase to 3.6°F and if at all possible, to 2.7°, thinking that the latter would be safe. But, would it? In 2020 alone, with 2° of warming, we had a wild Atlantic hurricane season; a catastrophic wildfire season in the western U.S.; the hottest temperature in world history, at 129.9°F in Death Valley; the strongest landfalling tropical cyclone ever, Super Typhoon Goni, with maximum sustained winds of 195 mph; record flooding in China; the second-lowest extent of Arctic sea ice ever recorded, which likely would have been the lowest if the summer hadn’t been cloudy; and as of the end of November, 44 weather-related disasters costing a billion dollars or more. And, oh yes, 2020 may turn out to be the hottest year on record.
If that doesn’t convince you that the direction of Earth’s climate is bad, then consider some of the other things that are already happening with 2° of warming. Ice is melting everywhere. Arctic sea ice will be gone in the summers in just a few years. Open ocean absorbs more heat from sunlight than ice, making the Arctic warm even faster, leading to the melting of permafrost and the release of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. A positive feedback loop. Ice on Greenland and Antarctica is melting ever faster, increasing the rate of sea level rise. Projections indicate as much as 6 ft by 2100 if we don’t limit CO2 emissions, but 1.7 ft even if we do, ? projections that many scientists think are too small. Mountain glaciers are also melting faster, putting the water supplies of people in the Andes and the Himalayas at risk. In addition, the huge quantities of fresh water entering the ocean from Greenland appear to be weakening the Gulf Stream.
Increasing temperatures are changing weather patterns, with multiple impacts. The most obvious is heatwaves. In addition, in many areas, humidity has also been increasing. The combination of high temperature and humidity is lethal because it prevents perspiration from cooling the body. Already, in some parts of the world, outdoor work must be limited during summer, with strong impacts on the poor. Extreme heat is often associated with prolonged drought, making it impossible to farm without irrigation. This is one of the factors causing migration toward the U.S. and Europe, with associated social disruption. Higher temperatures are also leading to tropical forest loss, with its replacement by savannah, thereby impacting both the ecosystem and its weather patterns.
As might be expected, climate change is leading to loss of many species of plants and animals. Because climate change is happening so rapidly, they can neither migrate nor evolve quickly enough to adapt to it, leading to their loss, and more and more often, to their extinction. So many are being lost that ecologists think we are experiencing the sixth great extinction. Sadly, children raised today will never know the world we have known, nor will they miss it because of the phenomenon of shifting baselines.
So yes, things are looking apocalyptic. In fact, all of this can be overwhelming, leading to both grief for what has been lost and fear of what will come. Before considering why I am still optimistic is spite of our situation, Joni will read a passage from an essay by Amy Westervelt, an award-winning climate journalist. It is titled “Mothering in an Age of Extinction” and is from a collection of essays by women about climate, called All We Can Save. Joni.
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In light of such profound feelings, how can I be optimistic? Surprisingly, it stems from my work with CAAV, the Climate Action Alliance of the Valley, started by Cathy Strickler 12 years ago. Because I give talks about climate change, I spend a lot of time keeping up with the news about it, as well as about energy, since climate change is, in essence, an energy problem. So almost six years ago, I thought I would share my effort with others, and I started compiling a weekly roundup of climate and energy news, which is shared by email and posted on the CAAV website. Preparing that roundup has become a sort of spiritual practice for me, because each week I must confront the disturbing science and deal with my grief over what is happening. Fortunately, I am able to counterbalance the bad news with the amazing things that are happening in the field of energy. They are the source of my optimism.
Of course, the outcome of the presidential election increased my optimism, particularly given the climate team that President-elect Biden has drawn together. Unfortunately, much of their time will be spent undoing what the Trump administration did, from repairing our reputation internationally to reestablishing the legal framework for limiting greenhouse gas emissions, all with a slim majority in the House and likely a Republican Senate. However, I also derive optimism from the recognition among some Republican lawmakers of the seriousness of the climate problem and their willingness to work toward a solution.
The countries signing the Paris Climate Agreement pledged to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions sufficiently to keep global average temperatures from rising more than 3.6°F, but their initial commitments were woefully insufficient to meet that goal. However, they also pledged to increase their efforts every five years. The EU made very strong new commitments this year, with a pledge to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 55% by 2030, and the UK promised to cut theirs by 68% by the same date. In addition, the EU, the UK, Japan, and South Korea have all pledged to achieve net zero emissions economy-wide by mid-century. Although China is still building coal-fired power plants, even they have pledged to be emission-free by 2060. All of these actions have caused at least one analyst to conclude that it just might be possible to achieve the Paris goals, although that remains very much in doubt. Because the Trump administration pulled the U.S. out the Paris Agreement, we didn’t increase our pledge, so we have far to go to catch up with the other industrialized nations. Hopefully, the Biden administration will move us along.
Technologically, the solution finding the most support is to electrify everything, from homes, to manufacturing, to transportation, using electricity that has been generated without CO2 emissions. Wind turbines and solar panels generate emission-free electricity, but they are intermittent. So, electrification of everything depends on the development and application of energy storage systems, as well as modernization of our electricity grid.
Advances in battery technology have been completely amazing. For example, the cost of lithium-ion batteries has fallen 89% since 2010 and within the next three years will be at the point where electric cars can be built more cheaply than conventional gasoline or diesel cars. Furthermore, within the last month two different companies have announced a new type of battery, solid-state, that is cheaper than lithium-ion, holds more electricity per unit weight, and can be charged faster. In addition, rapid advances are being made in stationary batteries for grid use. Already, solar plus battery storage is cheaper to install and use than gas-fired turbines. Reading about human ingenuity at work to solve this critical problem lifts my spirits and feeds my optimism.
So, what can you do to further our efforts to solve climate change and avoid the worst outcomes?
- Practice active hope, as advocated for by Joanna Macy and Chris Johnston in their book by that title. Note the word active.
- Take a clear view of reality.
- Identify the direction in which you’d like things to move.
- Take steps to move your situation in that direction, such as the following.
- Get to know your government officials at all levels and advocate for actions to reduce CO2 emissions. We must be the engine for the needed change.
- Embrace electrification of your house by replacing your oil or gas furnace with an electric heat pump, your gas range with an electric stove, and your gas water heater with an electric one.
- Improve the energy efficiency of your home by increasing insulation and buying energy star appliances.
- Install solar panels or invest in community solar.
- Replace your car with either a plug-in hybrid or a fully electric car. There’ll be many new models coming on the market during the next four years.
- Stop flying, or at least reduce it to the minimum required. Airplane emissions have a particularly strong effect.
- Eat less meat, particularly beef and lamb, which have very high greenhouse gas emissions associated with their production. Chicken and fish have much lower emissions, but a vegetarian diet is even better.
- Acknowledge the losses you’re experiencing and grieve for them, either privately or with a group.
- Get involved in some way. The more you act on the problem, the better you’ll feel.
- Recognize that we simply don’t know enough about the climate system to justify being pessimistic.
Finally, consider this thought from The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis, by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac, who ran the negotiations for the UN that led to the Paris Climate Agreement:
“When the eyes of our children, and their children, look straight into ours, and they ask us ‘What did you do?’ our answer cannot just be that we did everything we could.
“It has to be more than that.
“There is really only one answer.
“We did everything that was necessary.”
Blessed be.