Climate Change: OPTIMISM, IDEOLOGY AND REALITY

Little by little, we are getting a better understanding of how everything in nature is interconnected. We frequently use the word “ecology” to express the interdependence between species, between them and their habitats or them and other natural phenomena that once were thought not being related. We’re gradually understanding how, in any system, many factors can be affected by a single one, and vice-versa. In summary: that almost everything depends on almost everything, directly or indirectly, and that a single unregulated occurrence can affect a multitude of circumstances or balances.

When we circumscribe this systemic comprehension to a given fauna or region, we call it “ecosystem”. In the last decades, scientists have been studying separately many ecosystems in the most varied places in the world. What we haven´t quite understood yet, as it seems, is that our whole planet is, in its entirety, a vast ecosystem. When we damage one of its parts, we affect the rest. One day, the extent of the damages may be such that repairing them could be beyond our reach. The great and true riddle of our time is if that day has already come.

It would be good to always keep in mind that, in the past 50 years of climatic anguish and heated debates around the subject, optimists have almost never been right. Is it to be expected that they are now? In the past, we were slow to understand the speed of climate changes; now, and in reverse, we’re being slow to realize the speed with which we need to discover the technology needed to fight them. A lot of suffering and immense destruction will come to pass because of this.

Let’s put a personal question: have you ever thought that we may have reached, or may be about to reach, a point of no return? That, having crossed a certain threshold of artificial interference in the terrestrial ecosystem, we can unleash a climatic and biological disorder of such magnitude that we can do little more than watch, bewildered and almost powerless, its devastating consequences? That may already be the case, or not. We don´t really know. But if we continue to optimistically rely on hypothetical future technology to find a way out of the environmental disaster that awaits us around the corner, it remains no doubt that we’ll be caught off guard and with our pants in our hands. It will be better to speed up the pace a lot, and as soon as possible… Optimism, in this case, plays against us.

Another phenomenon that has not helped much in the fight against climate change is the fact that the issue has been contaminated by the ideological segmentation that has taken hold of modern politics.

Some political views, especially those commonly referred to as “left-winged”, appropriated these themes as if climate issues were specifically their causes. This happened for too long, in face of the relative passiveness of other political forces. When these finally noticed the impact of such issues in the public opinion, some did it in the worst way: instead of claiming the climate and environment issues as a common cause to every party division, or even hovering above it, they decided to adopt a hostile attitude and became “negationists”, particularly amongst the “radical right”.

What is “negationism”? It manifests itself in two ways: one of them simply denies that a global warming is taking place on the planet, seeing that notion as a mere conspiracy fueled by obscure and nefarious interests; the other, despite admitting that global warming may be happening, denies that it results from human action and its interferences in the cycles of nature and ecological balances (that is, it defends the premise that climate change is brought about by purely natural causes and has nothing to do with human activities).

Who can be right in these quarrels?

It’s quite possible, and even likely, that there are also purely natural causes influencing climate change, although it’s not yet clear what those are. After all, Earth’s climate hasn’t been always stable before the appearance of humans. There have been ample changes in the planet’s average temperature, there have been rises and falls in sea levels, there have been dramatic changes in the meteorology and biosphere of the continents. No one can seriously believe that all this global mutability has, at a certain point, drifted off into a fixed trend towards climatic stability, merely disturbed by recent human action. But on the other hand, taking every piece of gathered evidence into account, it is undeniable that human impact on Earth is decisively contributing to the intensity and pace of current climate change. The transformations imposed on the planet have been in such a scale that they have affected practically every ecosystem and every natural cycle. How could this not have severe repercussions in climates at large?

This is not an ideological matter, it’s a factual matter. These are not theories, as there are undeniable facts that show the greatness and the repercussion of the ongoing changes. The possible consequences of these changes may even challenge our imagination. But one doesn’t need to imagine too much. Extreme meteorologic phenomena that have been taking place have not only made climate change irrefutable but have given us a foreshadowing of how things can become worse: devastation on a scale never seen before caused by typhoons, floods, unbearable heat waves, devastating fires, at times with such magnitude as to throw into chaos entire countries or regions. And at a later phase, not that far off in time, capable of destroying our current civilizations as we know them.

Exaggeration? No. When it comes to climate change, everything is getting worse and at a faster pace than scientists had predicted. As a logical conclusion, the consequences of those changes can also be far worse than anticipated.

We’re running against the clock, but many political leaders have not yet realized the gravity of this whole issue.  They still think of climate change as a gradual phenomenon and unhurriedly announce less pollutant energy or vague reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. None of these promises will be enough, even if they were all kept (and many of them have not been). Mere pollutant emission reductions will no longer suffice. Given the point that we have come to, we could only begin to revert the process with new and efficient carbon capture technologies and geoengineering solutions – both of which we don’t have yet.

It’s not enough to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Even reduced, all these emissions will add to those that already remain in the atmosphere, which means they will simply aggravate the current situation. They will have a cumulative effect. And to the new emissions that we’ll make it will also be added every emission caused indirectly by our interference on the natural cycles and ecosystems. A vicious cycle of causes and effects is already in motion and, because of it, everything is happening much faster and much worse than anticipated by the most pessimistic experts. There are only two logical conclusions: 1^st) we don’t have until 2050 to reach carbon neutrality, without first suffering devastating consequences; 2^nd) we need to create and implement carbon capture technologies very quickly, as well as take advantage of natural processes that can contribute to the same goal.

If we don´t seriously face these two problems, our future will become very dark – and perhaps much earlier that we thought.

As the latest United Nations report on this topic states, “many of the changes we can observe on the climate are without precedent in thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years, and some of the changes already in motion – like the rising sea levels – are irreversible during the next hundreds or thousands of years”. And yet, that same report leaves a positive note: “However, strong and sustained reductions in emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases would limit climate change. While the benefits to air quality would be quick, it could take up to 20 or 30 years for global temperatures to stabilize.” Is it really so?

There seems to be, in this apparent showing of optimism, a certain care to steer away from climate alarmism, perhaps precisely the opposite of what would be necessary at this stage of events. The unavoidable truth is that all the most pessimistic scenarios of that and other similar entities have been far and wide surpassed by reality. This reveals that there have been repeated methodological errors in the forecasts made or there are acting causes of global warming that have not been correctly evaluated. Perhaps we are still unaware of some of them or the intricate web of interactions between them. Or perhaps the exponential character of the phenomena underlying climate change is underestimated. Sometimes there are even conclusions in the reports that only seem to reflect the search for an acceptable compromise between the different scenarios proposed by experts, a kind of reasonable consensus that does not undermine its scientific credibility. But it's impossible not to notice some inconsistencies.

To hold a lot of hope in a sharp reduction in pollutant emissions is like betting everything on a limping horse. Emissions have not stopped growing year after year, but even if we were able to reduce them from now on, new emissions will always add to the existing ones. Therefore, a reduction (even if drastic) in new emissions does not mean a reduction in the total amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. It will never be enough to stress this nor should there be any misunderstandings or illusions about it. Everything will depend on the positive or negative balance that we’ll manage to establish between the increase in the accumulated total of emissions and the carbon capture that occurs through natural or artificial processes.

Henceforth we will have a sort of current account with nature, but we will also need to work alongside her. Because in the end, to avoid predictable disasters, we and nature together will need to capture more carbon than is released in many different ways. For our share, we will need not only to facilitate the natural processes of this carbon capture but also to add others created by our own technology, and both as urgently as possible. In fact, it’s no longer rational to avoid alarmism, because we are running out of time to avoid the worst.

In 2018, a specialized agency of the United Nations published a special report in which it estimated that the planet was then 1ºC above pre-industrial levels. Now, three years later, it claims that it’s already 1,1ºC above those levels. You just have to do the math: if this pace of warming kept up, we would reach 2ºC even before 2050, which in itself would be frightening, as it represents even more than the same organism predicted just half a dozen years ago for the end of the century! There was, therefore, an acceleration. But the additional problem is that the pace of warming continues to accelerate, which means that every projection made in line with the current pace will quickly fall short: it’s dangerously underestimated for not taking this increasing acceleration into due account.

What does that imply for the world we live in? There will certainly be more intense heat waves, longer hot seasons and shorter cold seasons. But if global warming reaches 2ºC, extreme heat waves will more often hit critical tolerance limits for agriculture and health, also says the latest UN report. This means that various areas of the planet, spread across different continents and sparing none, might quickly reach temperatures in which human life becomes impossible, generating millions of climate refugees, many of them impoverished and desperate.

With regard to the rising sea levels, it’s possible that climate experts might again be surprised. If the pace of global warming is in fact being underestimated, by not being properly accounted its rising acceleration, this means that forecasts made for 2050 or for the end of the century might be reached much sooner. And it all bodes that they will, because the global situation continues to deteriorate in front of our very eyes. There are several reasons for it. Here are a few.

Over the last few decades, forests and oceans, along with soils, have been able to capture more than half of carbon dioxide emissions produced by human activities, using it in natural processes (such as photosynthesis, for example, function by which plants, algae and some bacteria, while in the presence of sunlight, transform carbon dioxide and water into organic matter, releasing oxygen). Therefore, forests and oceans act as “carbon sinks”, but their absorption capacity has limits and, worse than that, everything indicates they will become less efficient on the course of next decades, beyond the fact that the increase in emissions will not be accompanied by an increase of these “sinks”. On the contrary.

Forests are shrinking at a galloping pace, due to aggressive deforestation and large forest fires, covering ever wider areas. In many regions of the planet, the accelerated felling of trees and intentional burnings have given place to agricultural fields and pastures for intensive cattle raising. As an aggravating factor, fires and burnings release enormous quantities of carbon into the atmosphere, which counteracts current efforts to reduce industrial emissions. In the oceans, we can notice a rarefaction of phytoplankton, a varied set of microorganisms capable of photosynthesis that live floating on the surface of water (like algae and cyanobacteria) and not only assure the oxygenation of the water but also form the basis of aquatic food chain. This rarefaction is also taking place in many of great rivers and lakes, in addition to the fact that some of them are slowly shrinking in size. And the contribution of soils may also be affected, not only due to accelerated erosion and decomposition, but also due to the effect of pesticides and intensive farming.

The warming of the oceans is itself a problem, given that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere dissolves more easily in cold water than in warm water. Therefore, the warming of the water makes the process more difficult. Besides, surface waters carried from tropics, now warmer, to high latitudes (including polar regions) may accelerate the fusion of ices, leading to a reduction of salinity in superficial waters and increasing the stratification between these and waters in lower layers, what in turn reduces the downward movement of carbon dioxide into the deep ocean. Keeping in mind that differences of temperature and salinity in waters determine the path of maritime currents, significant variances in these parameters may alter the currents themselves, and they certainly will. Oceanic flows play a fundamental role in regulating global climate, as they are largely responsible for the transfer and redistribution of heat, thus preventing the planet from becoming more inhospitable. Therefore, an alteration in these flows might trigger drastic changes in the degree of habitability of many regions in the world.

But it’s hard to talk about oceans without mentioning one of the worst tragedies happening to them nowadays: the accumulation of hundreds of millions of tons of plastic, something that, according to some studies, is causing such damage to marine environments that we may have already crossed a line of no return. It’s not just the pollution caused by the plastics themselves, whose degradation takes tens or hundreds of years to occur and will progressively transform a large part of them into smaller debris (generically called “microplastics”) that will mix with the food of a lot of species, thus penetrating many food chains, including ours. Before that happens, these plastics absorb chemicals that freely float in the ocean and make them potentially toxic. When they’re ingested, they become doubly harmful and dangerous: by the very ingestion of the plastic, that is often lethal or capable of causing injuries, and by the accumulation of contaminating products in the viscera and muscles of marine animals, which concentrates them along the food chain. Without realizing it, a big part of them will end up on our plate.

This accumulation of plastics in rivers and oceans is taking place on such a scale that in some parts of the world we need to see it to believe it: there are Asian rivers so full of debris that you can no longer see the water, to the point that we can no longer tell that it’s a river we’re seeing, and in oceans have been formed rubbish islands bigger than some countries. The largest of them all is the famous Plastic Island that formed in the Pacific Ocean, between Hawai and California, which has about 1.6 million km2 (a total area three times bigger than France and 18 times the size of Portugal!) and keeps growing.

This kind of water pollution is affecting the survival of many species, some already on the brink of extinction. And we don’t know yet the full extent of its effects on marine ecosystems, although it’s probably a ticking time bomb. But less is said about its potential impact on climate change because influence of plastics on the warming of river and ocean waters has not yet been properly studied. The analogy may sound a bit too simplistic, but it’s plastic we often use to create land-based greenhouses, as it causes heat retention. If huge areas of ocean surface are now completely covered with plastic debris of all kinds, will this not harm aquatic thermal processes and heat redistribution, won’t photosynthesis be drastically affected, thus jeopardizing the survival of phytoplankton in these vast areas and threatening the entire food chain that depends on it? These are some questions to which we haven’t an enlightening answer yet. But no one will be surprised if it comes to be proved that pollution of waters by plastics is significantly contributing to the warming of the oceans.

One of the consequences of this warming is its pernicious or destructive effect on coral reefs around the world. Many corals are dying at various latitudes and at a fast pace. We easily understand the importance of this if we consider that one in every four marine species lives in coral reefs, including about 2/3 of all fish species, which in them find shelter, food and safe places to reproduce. One of the most obvious symptoms of coral withering is their progressive bleaching, which comes from a loss in biological interaction with algae they live in association with and is also related to an increase of diseases in corals themselves.

Making things worse, a phenomenon of ocean acidification is taking place. This happens due to the great quantity of atmospheric CO2 that dissolves in water, creating carbonic acid, a very unstable compound that by dissociation turns water more acidic. Acidification has a direct negative impact on coral structures, whose skeletons are made of limestone, what in this case represents a vulnerability that makes them more fragile and subject to being diluted. Needless to say that the decay and death of reefs, given their impacts on their respective ecosystems, may result in a drastic diminishing of the amount of fish in the affected areas, with dramatic consequences for food chains and fisheries. If storms, droughts and desertification represent a rising risk to agricultural production, obtaining food at sea may come to know worse days than the growing scarcity already felt today.

Scarcity is synonymous with high prices or famine. For populations that extract their food and basic income directly from land or sea, the future is uncertain. Some may take advantage of scarcity and inflation, others may be their victims. Among these, some may experience outbreaks of hunger and malnutrition. But for the bulk of individuals and families in almost all societies, less abundance in production or disturbances in the distribution of foodstuffs will represent an increase in costs and a step down in quality of life. In many places, this may represent a social setback of decades. However, given the overall picture resulting from climate change, this may well turn out to be the least of evils.