Guest Column: The Cancer of Global Warming

— by Joe Symons of NegawattMedia.com —

I don’t have cancer. I hope I don’t ever get cancer. At the same time, we know about cancer. We know that if we want to maximize our chances of survival, we need to discover and treat cancer early. Really early. Earlier than we personally could detect that it exists in us. Since cancer is relatively well known, and ugly, billions of dollars have been spent to detect and treat it. We don’t know everything, but we know enough to know we have to find it and nail it early. Global warming is like the first case of cancer. No one has seen it before. Even the term is a catchall. It might even sound comforting to someone in Minnesota in January. The term began decades ago when it was discovered that the earth’s temperature was climbing. Slowly. Steadily. No one really understood then what this term meant. Warming seemed a good enough description.

It’s not. Because we haven’t had millions of cases of global warming, like we have had millions of cases of cancer, we have no idea what this phenomena is. The first case of cancer probably killed the person who had it. Maybe the first 1000 people. Doctors and researchers had to figure out what was going on and try things. Since they had plenty of people to try things on, they have become way way better at detecting and defeating cancer. By contrast, we as a global community have never faced global warming before. We are going to have to try things, but the “things” we are going to try appear to be unpleasant, just like chemo and radiation and surgery. We know those cancer treatments work, mostly. We don’t know about the treatments for global warming. What will they cost? Will they be effective? How much will we suffer? What if we ignore it? Maybe it will go away?

We just don’t know. That could be a prescription for inaction. Let’s wait to see what happens. However, we know that if we take that attitude about cancer, it won’t be pretty. Cancer just doesn’t go away. It gets worse and untreated it will generally kill you, often painfully. Scientists are the doctor equivalents for Patient Earth. They may not know exactly how the Patient will do, but they know well enough that untreated, the Patient will alter life forms to adjust to new temperatures. She’s already doing that. In that “shift to a new reality”, She will do things in response to the heat. Just like steadily growing heat under a boiling pot will cause the water to boil over and spew scalding water all over the stove, that extra earth heat will take the form of bigger storms, wild fluctuations in weather patterns, floods, droughts, derechos, tornados. Things move much more when they are hot. That’s not anger. That’s physics. That’s the principle behind a bullet and a bomb.

What the earth doctors are saying about Patient Earth is that she is heating up faster than everyone thought. Since physics rules, that means weather patterns will get worse. Other things happen too, like ocean acidification. None of this might mean anything to you unless you like to eat and not dodge falling trees on a daily basis. The heat is merely a symptom of the problem. Patient Earth’s response to it is the consequence of the problem.

The problem has been triggered by an unprecedented rise in the quantity of what has come to be called greenhouse gases. Those gases, which include carbon dioxide and methane, are invisible, odorless, soundless, tasteless. The gases are lighter than air, so they rise and form a blanket over the earth. The gases come from burning fossil fuels: oil, coal, natural gas. Anyone who doesn’t know this by now has been living in a cave.

Heat is a symptom, Patient Earth’s response is the consequence, and green house gases are the cause, but what’s the real problem? Think lung cancer. Coughing is a symptom, feeling bad and maybe dying is a consequence, and smoking is the cause. But what is the problem? For lung cancer, it’s addiction. For humans, it’s an obsolete mythology.

The physics are simple and, because physics is just a term for fundamental laws of the universe, the laws are as immutable as the nuclear reaction in stars. Just because we can’t see carbon dioxide doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Just because we don’t like the idea of having to change our behavior (whether cancer or those Patient Earth consequences) doesn’t mean we get a pass.

For the last half million years, based on uncontroversial ice core data, the relationship between carbon dioxide and temperature has been in lock step. Just type “vostok ice core graph” into your browser. During this period, CO2 has peaked around 280 parts per million (ppm); when it did, Patient Earth’s bounty was similar to what we knew in the middle of the 20th Century because temperatures met the Goldilocks standard. Not too hot, not too cold. When the CO2 was much lower, so was the temperature, and there was an ice age.

Because of the unprecedented increase in burning fossil fuel to move humanity up what might have been called the progress ladder, the global ppm has now climbed to 400 and change. Patient Earth doctors have seen Her temperature rise, as if she had the beginnings of a fever. She’s not doing so well. Having an off day. Really the beginnings of an off millennium. Taking a wild guess based on almost no prior experience, the doctors came to a preliminary consensus that if the global ppm did not exceed 450, the resulting fever that Patient Earth would have would be tolerable. She’d only (probably) have a 2° fever. Not great but probably not life threatening.

But life threatening to whom? To Patient Earth? No. It’s just physics. Stars form and burn out and die. Planets form and have life, or not, and that life adjusts to the conditions of the planet, or not. If the conditions change just a tiny bit, “life” might not change all that much. Look at the Vostock chart. You’ll see 4 ice ages. Those ice ages were chilly for sure but life could work with that temp range.

400 ppm is way off the chart. No one knows what the temp will be, and thus no one knows how well life forms will adapt to that temp. Far more to the point, we are not stuck at 400. We’re well on our way past 450 to maybe 550 or more. Now. It’s in the pipeline. It just hasn’t “hit” the meters, and like the descent of a fever, it has a multi-century and some say irreversible trajectory. Patient Earth is on it. We are on Patient Earth. She makes our food. She makes 100°+F days for weeks or months in a row. She’s got a fever. We are giving it to her. Do the math.

Constant and severe weather disruptions affect plants, animals and bugs. As those species die off or don’t function like we want or expect them to, the bounty that they used to provide drops off fast. That bounty isn’t cute Disney Bambi scenes: it is your food, from the sea or the land. It’s not just the food. It’s also the systems. In the Northwest, humans (west of the Cascades) don’t need air conditioning . Everywhere else in America we do (even if it didn’t exist 40 years ago). A/C needs power and as a nation our national grid is maxed out. Power needs water. Since water evaporates faster in a warmer world, water shrinks from rivers to become airborne. Power plants use humongous quantities of water. They can’t work if there is warmer water or no water. (https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2013/01/130130-water-demand-for-energy-to-double-by-2035/)

(This is the first part of a 2 part commentary; part two will be posted tomorrow)