Delaying extinction

In the movie Titanic, when the man spots the iceberg, a chain of aggressive steps are taken to change the direction of the ship in order to avoid collision. By the time the ship reaches the iceberg, the direction has already changed significantly but not nearly enough to avoid the collision. While a head on collision is averted, the ship still hits the iceberg on the side, which leads to its eventual sinking. Only time is bought with the direction being changed.

The story of climate change is not different. Science now knows that the world has reached a point of no return. We have burnt so much fossil fuel and thereby added so much carbon to our atmosphere that even if we were to completely stop carbon emissions right now, the planet would still continue to heat because of the immense quantity of carbon that is already existing in the atmosphere.

Before anything else, I want to state a few elementary facts about climate change that I believe many writers of climate change do not mention very often and the average reader is left somehow clueless about crucial facts. Fancy terms and jargon laden expressions only add to the misunderstanding. Remember we live in the age of misinformation, conspiracy theories, and fake news. We cannot afford skipping over crucial details.

Everytime climate change is discussed, it is mentioned that greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide have increased in our atmosphere causing the temperature to rise. That last sentence has the capability to create a lot of confusion and yet it is the most commonly used sentence. I fail to fathom why they make the leap from carbon emissions to rising temperatures without explaining why carbon emissions cause the planet to heat up.

The light and heat energies that we get on the Earth is from the thermonuclear reaction in the sun. Much of that heat and the heat we humans and animals generate on Earth has to escape through the atmosphere into the black vacuum of space. When we emit too much carbon into the air, it accumulates into the atmosphere and creates a blockage to that escaping heat. As a result, the heat stays on Earth causing the temperature to rise, oceans to rise, permafrost to melt, the Arctic to melt, the whole nine yards.

With the temperature increase from 1.5 to just 2 degree Celsius, which is what the Paris Climate Agreement strove to keep, the world would see an estimated 250 million climate deaths. That is equal to seven holocausts. That is just a half degree of temperature rise, which will trigger (it actually already has) a chain of events compounding each other in its journey toward our extinction. And just so we realise, carbon emissions are not zero today and we are well on our way to hit that horrifying mark outpacing all scientific models and predictions.

Carbon can be reduced by natural ways such as growing trees and some have suggested technologically advanced methods such as carbon suction. Many scientists have discarded that as wishful thinking. Furthermore, the technologically savvy private sector is the very player that caused the climate change in the first place. There have been some futurist tales of tailor-made designer climates where in certain areas, things would be normal. That is not the solution because climate change is not like street crime or terrorism, which could be avoided by moving to another place. When Hollywood celebrities escaped from their homes during the California wildfires of 2020, they could not move to their expensive Louisiana homes because that place was being battered by a climate change-caused hurricane at the very time.

By changing our lifestyles, we can only delay the extinction of our species. It may not be our grandchildren who will be the last human species but may be their grandchildren. Either way, this would be the first human-caused climate change.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 16^th, 2020.

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