Climate change: THE TRIUMPH OF IGNORANCE

For those with an interest on politics and its backstage, the partisan’s life provides a considerable quantity of criticism, analyses, commentaries and defamations; however, the sheer amount of attention given to today’s intricate scenarios, as well as its characters, prevents us from seeing one of our most significant realities: the imminence of enormous and consecutive catastrophes posed by progressive climate change.

A large majority of the population considered cultured or instructed has but a pale idea of the realities we are about to face, should we not take preemptive measures in time. And among those living in underdeveloped countries and with little to no schooling, unarguably still a majority in every continent, the unawareness as to every global problem is such that they are unable to view that it will be them, with high probability, those who will most quickly and considerably suffer the consequences that lie ahead, either as a result of poverty or negligence.

As for the most developed countries, including ours, the environmental and climate matters have been widely talked about, occasionally being reduced to a mere political or intellectual fashion, or even an agenda for the media; and yet, in spite of its popularity, the subject has been largely underestimated.

There is a vague notion that climate change will mostly impact remote areas, at least in the short term, and that the more developed regions will find the necessary means to gradually adapt to its effects.  Perhaps they will be found, but there is no guarantee. Regardless, immense changes in their territories and economies are inevitable, with this being a phenomenon which greatly transcends the sphere of common politics and its more transient effects.

It’s not simply about tackling air pollution and the accumulation of garbage in all oceans, or delaying the rhythm of sea level rise, or moderating the mass extinction of species occurring nowadays.

What is truly happening is something far larger in scale – and worse. There is no appropriate frame to represent the huge threats to which we are exposed and its biological and civilizational consequences. Even the term “catastrophe” may prove insufficient to express this danger, should we conceive the status of deprivation and widespread chaos which may come as a result of climate-related devastation. We may be used to deal with catastrophes of various kinds, but nothing has yet prepared us for what is to come: sudden and significant transformations in our environment, which we shall not be ready to face, even considering the scientific and technological advancements at our disposal.

One of the current misconceptions in public opinion and in the planning of many leaders is the belief that climate change is a slow and gradual shift; unfortunately, this is not so.

Climate change started out as a slow process when its causes were still fairly moderate. But these causes have expanded quite a lot and several others have joined them in the meantime, so that their effects are progressively growing and acquiring an increasing pace. In other words, catastrophes of several kinds (droughts, wildfires, storms, floods, plagues, epidemics) occur with increasing intensity, as well as gradually briefer gaps in between.

This increasing intensity and frequency are just two of the aspects that are implicit in the concept of “exponential growth”, a mathematical notion which many are using nowadays (including journalists) without knowing exactly what it means. An exponential phenomenon is not just a phenomenon whose effects are increasing and accumulating, it’s above all a phenomenon whose effects are multiplying. In other words: it’s constantly accelerating, as is currently the case with global warming and rising sea levels.

It is essential to understand this point: when a phenomenon becomes exponential, it’s no longer slow and it’s no longer gradual. It does not occur at a constant rate, but at a progressively increasing one. In what comes to phenomena that give rise to natural disasters, these will be ever more extensive, frequent and destructive, quickly seeming to exceed the limits of all human predictability and of our collective capacity to halt them. And everything becomes even worse when the effects of a phenomenon add to its causes, creating a vicious circle, thus increasing its dangers and complexity. And this is exactly the situation in which we are now: we are plunged in a spiral of climatic events whose outcome is uncertain, but certainly tragic. What awaits us henceforth is perhaps more than a mere succession of catastrophes, it may turn out to be (at least due to the accumulation of its consequences) a true global cataclysm, given that we will witness a drastic modification of a large part of Earth's surface, of its natural habitats and their living conditions, and also of the livelihoods of their respective populations. And we don't know how quickly that may happen, nor at what pace we'll be able to adapt.

But, some may say, with all the scientific tools we have at our disposal, isn’t our forecasting capacity able to draw fairly realistic scenarios for the future? No, it isn't, far from it.

No need to look much for blunt evidence. When, in 1997, politicians and scientists from all over the world elaborated and signed the historic Kyoto Protocol, aiming to fight global warming, they were based on measurable phenomena and trends, that is, on analyzes compatible with the data and instruments existing at that time. There were some optimistic forecasts and others of a more pessimistic nature, but the agreements were made assuming an average scenario, discarding the most extreme anticipations on both sides of the range of hypotheses. However, twenty years later, it was inevitable to come to the conclusion that the most pessimistic forecasts were resoundingly surpassed by the facts – and by a wide margin. In other words: not even the most alarmist specialists were able to anticipate what actually happened. And this is dangerous, far too dangerous. It reveals, first of all, that our cutting-edge knowledge was not (and probably still is not) up to assessing the full dimension of the climate trouble we are in. The livelihood or even the survival of a large part of human population could be at risk in the future – and we are not even fully aware of this yet, nor of the serious conflicts that may arise as a result of the possible scarcity of resources.

“Eeeh, enough with the alarmism”, some will say. “We will certainly continue to do whatever is necessary to avoid the worst scenarios. Let’s not lay down our arms and everything will be solved, better or worse, whatever the means needed”… Indeed, this optimistic voluntarism may be a desirable state of mind; yet, when it comes to facing the threats, and from a scale perspective, maybe it's not much more than that. In fact, when considering what’s necessary, it’s little more than nothing. We’re running the risk of turning our planet largely uninhabitable in just a few decades, and no positive thinking will be able to prevent it. We will need much more than that.

Tragically, we have allowed things get to a point where prudence and goodwill are no longer enough. Instead, what is needed now is to sound all alarms, even though still remains, in academic contexts, a certain aversion to “climate alarmism” as a condition of scientific credibility. But as an old proverb says, it’s before the house being robbed that we must lock the door; and I fear, in this case, not even that shall suffice anymore. In order to tackle the potential threats and their terrible repercussions, we’ll need more than political commitment and large financial means; we’ll need several and substantial scientific advances, along with a large amount of technology that is not yet available or even conceived.

The erroneous notions that were spread about the pace of climate change and its effects, supposedly at the rate of a given value per year or per decade, have given us an artificial and misleading tranquility about the time we have left to fix things and how urgently we need to do it. Perhaps everything would have gone differently if scientists and the media had tried more persistently to make us understand what, deep inside, we all know: natural phenomena don’t always occur gradually and are sometimes subject to major discontinuities, sudden alterations in rhythm or intensity and interferences that can attenuate or aggravate what we believe to be predictable. Yes, we know it: what starts as something gradual (or apparently so) may come to cause huge and sudden changes, some of them foreseeable, some quite unexpected. But when we consider them remote or hypothetical, we generally prefer not to worry too much. This is an old self-protective tendency of our brains: not to create unnecessary stress. However, in this particular case, the shot can backfire on us.

We all have seen images of ice floes crashing down in icebergs and glaciers or avalanches sliding on snow-capped mountains. Before such a phenomenon could happen, there might have been a slow erosion process, yet the outcome is quick. In the case of ice, after the crash it will likely melt in a relatively short time, which we may consider insignificant when compared with the time needed for its erosion. There are reports of gigantic icebergs that completely melted in a few days or weeks. In fact, there is no way around the laws of physics: under natural conditions, when surrounding temperature reaches or approaches zero degrees, ice begins to melt; and the bigger the surface being exposed to higher temperatures, the more rapidly it will melt; and the less compact or the more cracked ice is as a result of earlier erosions, the easier it breaks and the faster it melts; and the more intense the heat wave, the less time ice shall resist.

This means that, if occur abnormal temperature rises in atmosphere or in oceans’ currents, large ice masses may melt in a short time lapse, at a far more significant pace than we have known within the last quarter of century. Since 1992 to the present day, Antarctica and Greenland, which have the two largest ice mantels on the planet, have already lost above seven trillion tons of ice and this loss has resulted in a global sea level rise surpassing two centimeters. However, such a seemingly small change gives us but a modest notion of what that may imply in terms of erosion and coastal floods, and by no means provides a safe yardstick for assessing what may happen in the present decade and the following ones, because the melting of the great ice masses is now in constant acceleration and obvious expansion. NASA satellites have detected in 2012 that the surface on which the melting of Greenland’s icy sheet was evident had surpassed the usual 40% during summer months to a staggering 97% in just a few days, due to a heat wave in the atmosphere. Scientists were forced to conclude that the repetition of such phenomena could eventually lead to a quick and utter meltdown. This is cause for alarm: if the entire Greenland ice mantle, which covers approximately 80% of its territory, melted completely, that would raise sea levels by more than seven meters. But not going so far, if only one-seventh of that huge icy mass were to melt, then the sea level rise would correspond to around a meter, enough to flood most of the world's coastal cities and to cause the loss of large portions of shoreside territories in every continent, as well as the disappearance of countless islands. To think that this may only occur gradually in the range of many decades is a naïve and dangerous assumption, and so is considering the partial melting of Greenland as an isolated phenomenon, forgetting the contribution of simultaneous melting in other frozen masses on the planet.

Some climate studies suggest that the Arctic may run out of ice up until 2035, as a result of rising temperatures in the region. One of the most feared consequences is the melting of the so-called “permafrost”, a vast expanse of soil which remains frozen through the entire year and covers 25% of the land surface in Northern Hemisphere, mostly in Canada, Greenland and Russia, but also in Norway and Alaska. This frozen surface contains carbon dioxide, methane and toxic mercury, while also being a reservoir of viruses and bacteria with which recent humanity has never had any contact and against which it most likely has no immunity.

The “permafrost” is composed by a mixture of permanently frozen land, ice and rocks, constituting a layer that is covered by another layer of ice and snow which can reach a depth of 200 meters in some places during winter, but melts afterwards progressively with the rising temperatures and becomes reduced to a thickness of mere 0.5 to 2 meters upon melting (therefore turning the soil’s surface swampy, since the waters at the surface are not absorbed by the frozen soil, a fact that diminishes its capacity for solar reflection). This frozen soil is rich in organic substances which slowly decompose; but when ”permafrost” melts, bacteria and fungi are able to decompose the carbon contained in that organic matter far more quickly, releasing it into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide or methane, both gases responsible for the greenhouse effect. And experts describe a vicious cycle: the gases released from the “permafrost” accelerate global warming, which in turn hastens the melting of the “permafrost”. In day-to-day language, it’s a “snowball effect”.

According to another recent study, the “permafrost” in the Northern Hemisphere alone contains more than twice the amount of carbon already existing in the atmosphere, and a fast thaw may contribute immensely to global climate change. The amount of carbon dioxide and methane which it may send to the atmosphere depends on the rhythm of its melting, but there is large evidence that successive abnormally warm summers are speeding up the melting process considerably and drastically thinning out the upper layers of enormous subterraneous ice blocks, which have been frozen solid for millennia. In vast swaths of icy territory, it may take some time until defrost temperature has been reached; but, once reached, defrost itself will be a quick process – and one could even say abrupt, because it does not fit in our notion of something progressive or gradual.

Let’s imagine a sea ice block with an initial temperature of -25ºC. If the surrounding temperature rises or oscillates, for a long time nothing seems to happen until the melting point is reached, which in the case of sea ice is roughly -2ºC (a little lower than for “pure” ice, due to the quantity of dissolved salts, which render it even more vulnerable). But when the melting point is reached, regardless of how much time may have passed or how many thermal fluctuations may have occurred, the ice actually thaws and the higher the surrounding temperature is, the more quickly ice will melt. In fact, we know from experience and from laws of physics that other changes in the state of matter also work in a more or less abrupt way: when we leave a kettle of water to boil, we need to wait for some time until the temperature has risen enough; and the heating may seem to us slow and gradual, yet as soon as it reaches 100ºC the water immediately starts to boil and evaporate; and no matter what we do, we are unable to bring the steam back into the kettle... This may be simple to understand, but under natural conditions things are a little more complex and therefore less predictable.

The fact that “permafrost” is composed of different materials, with different freezing points and different cohesion degrees, may turn it more vulnerable to breakdown and cracking than large homogeneous ice masses, greatly increasing the extent of its exposure and thus the potential of erosion, with this, in turn, causing the melting process to be much faster than initially expected. In general, the more rugged the relief is and the more rifts it contains, the more vulnerable to defrosting it will be – and that evolution is taking place at an alarming rate, in a large area of the Arctic region. Paradoxically, instead of worrying about this and other related phenomena, many political leaders in the region are just attempting to discover how to take advantage of the Artic melting to benefit commercial shipping and the creation of new ports, without understanding the extent of the threat or the real scope of the problem.

Something is changing fast and the real magnitude of the consequences is still unpredictable. The influx into the oceans of abnormal amounts of water resulting from the increasingly intense summer defrost not only raises the sea level and the impact of tides, but also increases the destructive potential of these ones and of coastal storms, not to mention possible tsunamis, which harass with irregular frequency some regions of the planet. On the other hand, it is quite likely that this considerable influx of water into the oceans may cause shifts in temperature and path of ocean currents, thus causing strong impacts on various regional climates, affecting their biodiversity and their economy. Truly dramatic consequences could occur in just a few years. Events and transformations that for a long time seemed to happen only in a gradual way can suddenly rush and completely subvert any previous calculations and expectations.

The quick melting of “permafrost”, for example, poses a considerable sanitary threat. Many experts believe that in those frozen soils may be trapped viruses and bacteria associated to past diseases, some of them entirely unknown, others supposedly extinct. The probability of a lethal pandemic arising is not to be ignored, even considering the current means of medicine. Humanity is still living the disruptive effects of a relatively benign pandemic, whose average mortality rate is only about 2% of known unvaccinated infected (if we consider the real number of infected people, including those asymptomatic or undiagnosed, the mortality rate is even lower). But not too far back in time, the fourteenth-century Black Plague is known to have wiped out over a half of the European population, which by then was much more dispersed and rural than it is now. We can imagine what could happen nowadays with any equally deadly microorganism, or even less mortiferous, should it be spread amongst modern urban crowds with their high population density, also considering the ease and speed of the transportation means of today.

The displacement of climate zones or the persistent alteration of their usual temperature and pluviosity patterns may also have repercussions beyond expectations. Traditional agriculture for self-sustainment may be rendered unviable, much of both fauna and flora of each affected region may not be able to survive the changes, entire ecosystems may be destroyed, economic sectors may be prone to significant decreases and constrictions, scarcity of food and other essentials may become the norm, several sources of income may be extinguished, civil wars and urban turmoil may break out, transmissible diseases of various sorts and latitudes could find new areas on which to propagate themselves. It should be noted that all these scenarios are of high probability, rather than a simple product of imagination.

And with an aggravating factor: global warming will not be evenly distributed across the planet, contrary to what many tend to believe. We’ll be witnessing, more and more frequently, an intensification of extreme weather phenomena, including great waves of intense heat or freezing cold, some of them in regions where they were not at all usual or even expectable. Recent events show that both torrid heat and polar cold may in the future appear where least expected, due to drastic changes in atmospheric currents, and flooding rains may fall in places that used to have moderate rainfall. In fact, we are already getting used to suffocating heat waves in northern countries, to large forest fires in USA, Canada, Sweden and Siberia, and the Mediterranean area is chronically becoming a great summer hell.

 Initially, it was thought that regions which were already hot would tend to become hotter and normally cold regions could become even colder, but this prediction proved to be partially wrong, as extremes of temperature and rainfall now seem to escape all logic and all forecasting models, appearing almost anywhere without warning. Diluvial rains have recently fallen in such disparate places as Germany and neighboring countries, Turkey, China, Japan, Nigeria, the Philippines, and in recent years have also fallen on India, Bangladesh, Iran, Indonesia, Mozambique and South Africa, among other places. Climate appears out of control almost everywhere and, in line with this global trend, areas that were once temperate may be ceasing to be so very soon. Seasons themselves are breaking out of the usual patterns, either in sequence or in length, and in some regions they are becoming unrecognizable. It goes without saying how much all this can affect countless economic activities in each country (including the destruction of soils and crops), damage buildings and infrastructures or hinder geographic mobility, one of the fundamental components of modern life.

What we have been able to observe in recent years leads to two inevitable conclusions: while for a long time we feared mostly a gradual sea level rise and its possible effects upon coastal areas, we are now faced with the more immediate and equally destructive threat posed by diluvial rains and floods of biblical proportions, which may occur suddenly and almost anywhere, even right in the interior of continents; and although many analysts and leaders conceived scenarios predicting relatively moderate increases in global average temperature over the next few decades, we are in fact facing large disparities in the worsening of average local temperatures, which in some parts of the world is being much more intense and faster than initially thought, and we become astonished by the appearance of infernal heat waves in the most unlikely regions, which make us put into question, by their consequences, even the theoretical boundaries of the most pessimistic scenarios. The Arctic, for instance, is warming up thrice as quickly as the rest of the planet and its winters are getting warmer, thereby hampering ice formation, whereas in the rest of the year forest fires are becoming more frequent and intense, while the extent of the defrost is becoming continually wider.

The average temperature of Earth has risen by about 1°C from the pre-industrial era to the turn of the millennium, and from then onwards until the end of the present decade it will have worsened by another 0.5°C, reaching twenty years ahead of schedule the 1.5°C limit that the 2015 Paris Agreement had proposed as a target for participating countries. This means, in approximate terms, that global warming’s rhythm has tripled since the already obsolete Kyoto Protocol of 1997. Despite all the political rhetoric and the amount of good intentions that has been announced, the truth is that more than half of the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels was emitted only in the last three decades. And instead of decreasing, as would be supposed by the application of restrictive policies, from 1990 to 2020 the annual global emissions of greenhouse gases grew 41% and are still increasing with each passing year. This clearly shows that the great imminent threats are still not taken seriously enough, despite all the mediatic and ideological outcry.

Meanwhile, obedient only to natural laws and unmindful of diplomatic efforts, our planet keeps on warming up. And as a result of the uneven distribution of average temperature rise, some parts of the world are heating much faster than others. Soon, many of them will become uninhabitable or suffer severe blows to their traditional livelihoods. The consequences are hardly predictable in their magnitude, but one of them is certain: the emergence of increasing waves of climate refugees, in search of survival or a better life, fleeing from intense heat, desertification, floods, famine or violence generated by the scarcity of resources. Up until the midst of our century, it could be hundreds of millions. It remains to be seen which countries will be able and willing to welcome them, in a world full of ethnic and identity conflicts and where migration is already one of the most important factors of civil conflict (and even, in some cases, diplomatic or military). Racial and ethnic mixtures, cultural and religious clashes, linguistic divisions and everyday customs, as well as the notorious difficulties in the full integration of immigrants (who, in many cases, do not want to be assimilated) are bringing countless societies to the boil. A considerable increase in migratory pressure, even if triggered by situations of humanitarian crisis, does not bode well. Besides having to face the unrestrained violence of the climate change, everything suggests that we’ll also have decades of social upheaval and the proliferation of civil unrest ahead of us. As popular wisdom says, a tragedy never comes alone.