—
In their aspirational grandeur, all these terms suggest the holistic prospective of a new philosophy, and new ethics, ushered into being by a new world. A raft of popular recent books aims to do the same, their titles so plaintive you could count their spines like rosary beads. Perhaps the baldest entry is Roy Scranton’s Learning to Die in the Anthropocene. In it, the author, a veteran of the Iraq War, writes, “The greatest challenge we face is a philosophical one: understanding that this civilization is already dead.” His subsequent book of essays is We’re Doomed. Now What?
All these works portend a turn toward the apocalyptic, whether literal, cultural, political, or ethical. But another turn is possible, too, even probable, and perhaps the more tragic for its conspicuous plausibility: that the preponderance of our reflexes in the face of human strife run in the opposite direction, toward acclimatization.
This is the yowling torque muffled by the bland-seeming phrase “climate apathy,” which may otherwise feel merely descriptive: that through appeals to nativism, or by the logic of budget realities, or in perverse contortions of “deservedness,” by drawing our circles of empathy smaller and smaller, or by simply turning a blind eye when convenient, we will find ways to engineer new indifference. Gazing out at the future from the promontory of the present, with the planet having warmed one degree, the world of two degrees seems nightmarish—and the worlds of three degrees, and four, and five yet more grotesque. But one way we might manage to navigate that path without crumbling collectively in despair is, perversely, to normalize climate suffering at the same pace we accelerate it, as we have so much human pain over centuries, so that we are always coming to terms with what is just ahead of us, decrying what lies beyond that, and forgetting all that we had ever said about the absolute moral unacceptability of the conditions of the world we are passing through in the present tense, and blithely.
IV
The Anthropic Principle
What if we’re wrong? Perversely, decades of climate denial and disinformation have made global warming not merely an ecological crisis but an incredibly high-stakes wager on the legitimacy and validity of science and the scientific method itself. It is a bet that science can win only by losing. And in this test of the climate we have a sample size of just one.
No one wants to see disaster coming, but those who look, do. Climate science has arrived at this terrifying conclusion not casually, and not with glee, but by systematically ruling out every alternative explanation for observed warming—even though that observed warming is more or less precisely what would be expected given only the rudimentary understanding of the greenhouse effect advanced by John Tyndall and Eunice Foote in the 1850s, when America was reaching its first industrial peak. What we are left with is a set of predictions that can appear falsifiable—about global temperatures, sea-level rise, and even hurricane frequency and wildfire volume. But, all told, the question of how bad things will get is not actually a test of the science; it is a bet on human activity. How much will we do to stall disaster, and how quickly?
Those are the only questions that matter. There are, it is true, feedback loops we don’t understand and dynamic warming processes scientists haven’t yet pinpointed. Yet to the extent we live today under clouds of uncertainty about climate change, those clouds are projections not of collective ignorance about the natural world but blindness about the human one, and can be dispersed by human action. This is what it means to live beyond the “end of nature”—that it is human action that will determine the climate of the future, not systems beyond our control. And it’s why, despite the unmistakable clarity of the predictive science, all of the tentative sketches of climate scenarios that appear in this book are so oppressively caveated with possiblys and perhapses and conceivablys. The emergent portrait of suffering is, I hope, horrifying. It is also, entirely, elective. If we allow global warming to proceed, and to punish us with all the ferocity we have fed it, it will be because we have chosen that punishment—collectively walking down a path of suicide. If we avert it, it will be because we have chosen to walk a different path, and endure.
These are the disconcerting, contradictory lessons of global warming, which counsels both human humility and human grandiosity, each drawn from the same perception of peril. The climate system that gave rise to the human species, and to everything we know of as civilization, is so fragile that it has been brought to the brink of total instability by just one generation of human activity. But that instability is also a measure of the human power that engineered it, almost by accident, and which now must stop the damage, in only as much time. If humans are responsible for the problem, they must be capable of undoing it. We have an idiomatic name for those who hold the fate of the world in their hands, as we do: gods. But for the moment, at least, most of us seem more inclined to run from that responsibility than embrace it—or even admit we see it, though it sits in front of us as plainly as a steering wheel.
Instead, we assign the task to future generations, to dreams of magical technologies, to remote politicians doing a kind of battle with profiteering delay. This is why this book is also studded so oppressively with “we,” however imperious it may seem. The fact that climate change is all-enveloping means it targets all of us, and that we must all share in the responsibility so we do not all share in the suffering—at least not all share in so suffocatingly much of it.
We do not know the precise shape such suffering would take, cannot predict with certainty exactly how many acres of forest will burn each year of the next century, releasing into the air centuries of stored carbon; or how many hurricanes will flatten each Caribbean island; or where megadroughts are likely to produce mass famines first; or which will be the first great pandemic to be produced by global warming. But we know enough to see, even now, that the new world we are stepping into will be so alien from our own, it might as well be another planet entirely.
—
In 1950, walking to lunch at Los Alamos, the Italian-born physicist Enrico Fermi, one of the architects of the atom bomb, found himself caught up in a conversation about UFOs with Edward Teller, Emil Konopinski, and Herbert York—so caught up that he drifted off in thought, jumping back in long after everyone else had moved on to ask, “Where is everybody?” The story has now passed into scientific legend, the interjection known as Fermi’s paradox: If the universe is so big, then why haven’t we encountered any other intelligent life in it?
The answer may be as simple as climate. Nowhere else in the known universe is a single planet as suited as this one to produce life of the kind we know, as Fermi’s only children. Global warming makes the proposition seem even more precarious. For the entire historical window in which human life evolved, almost all of the planet has been, climatologically speaking, quite comfortable for us; that is how we managed to get here. But it wasn’t always the case even on Earth, where it is no longer comfortable, and only getting less so. No human has ever lived on a planet as hot as this one; it will get hotter. In talking about that near future, several climate scientists I spoke with proposed global warming as a Fermi solution. The natural lifespan of a civilization may only be several thousand years long, and the lifespan of an industrial civilization conceivably only several hundred. In a universe that is many billions of years old, with star systems separated as much by time as by space, civilizations might emerge and develop and then burn themselves up simply too fast to ever find one another.