The Earth Doesn’t Have A Thermostat

Mike, I wrote something back in December of 2015, and I’m going to just paste it below because I believe it still holds. In fact it says some things that might have been thought of by those reading it at the time as defeatist, but they all still apply fully today, even though I hoped they wouldn’t.

Before I paste that piece though, I want to quickly add a little lesson I took to heart. It’s about a prehistoric painted cave in France called Lascaux and how it relates to the widespread belief — and hope — that we can “science the shit out of this” to fix our problems.

Lascaux is a UNESCO World Heritage site and one of the most important prehistoric parietal art sites in the world. Effectively, the cave and it’s paintings were affected by human-caused climate change — in the cave itself, not outside in the environment. This was micro-scale climate change. It caused damage to the paintings, and every technology applied by hundreds of scientists from around the world to fix the cave caused newer and more grave problems. You can read about it on Wikipedia and elsewhere.

At this point, the paintings in the galleries that were accessible to the public are for the most part obliterated. The cave is closed forever, and will never recover. But nearby, a newer more modern 50 million euro replica opened last December. We can’t build a new replica of the Earth, and science couldn’t save a cave from climate change, so isn’t it insane to think it will be able to save the Earth?

Here’s what I wrote back in 2015:

On-going negotiations in Paris for the COP-21 agreement are centered around the goal of keeping temperatures from rising more that 2 degrees centigrade, with a hoped-for limit of 1.5 degrees… But the Earth doesn’t have a thermostat with which we can control what will actually happen.

To say that our science is incomplete is a given. I’m not talking about whether or not humans have destabilized Earth’s climate — we have. I’m talking about how our incomplete science becomes even more tenuous a tool for future predictions in the face of a destabilized climate. To talk as if we can control what will happen in the future under never before seen circumstances when we can hardly even predict the weather two days out, speaks of an arrogance that outdoes even the normal arrogance of neoliberalism. It is insane.

I’m not being a pessimist here, although those who are hoping for a good media announcement to assuage the fears of the general public so that we can continue business-as-usual would most likely disagree with me; I am very optimistic that most people already get it and know that whatever comes out of COP-21 will have little to do with reducing climate extremes, because it is still and always will be, up to us to take action. Not governments, not businesses, not science, and certainly not God. It’s all on us.

But I am concerned that the worst offenders, those people who just don’t care about the future and don’t care about anyone other than themselves, will swallow this idea that we can set the temperature of the Earth, as the heads-of-state in Paris seem to assume, and they will lead others away from our rightful responsibility for saving ourselves. That would be a terrible outcome of all this blather about limiting future temperature increases.

It’s clear to many that our current way of doing things is suicidal; not just non-sustainable. If that is the case, as I believe it is, there is nothing that will be coming out of COP-21 other than business-as-usual, and we don’t have time for that anymore.

Urgent action is needed, so let’s get a move on. It’s up to us, individually and collectively to fix what we have broken. I optimistically believe that we can and that we want to — for ourselves, for our children, and for the generations to come. And I hope the governments of the world will get the hell out of our way!