Why is Global Warming so hard to understand and respond to?

I attended a professional dinner on the weekend where one of the speakers was a University Executive who was formerly an engineering professor working on biofuels. As you might expect, he brought up the concept of global warming in his talk, but the way in which he explained it made it sound like the burning of fossil fuels raised the average global temperature through the heat generated by combustion and not through the increase in GHGs (greenhouse gasses). As a result, in the Q&A he had to fend off a number of comments that nuclear power was terrible from the point of view of global warming due to the enormous quantities of waste heat released.

While the speaker could obviously have expressed himself better, his talk got me wondering about why global warming due to the emission of GHGs is such a difficult concept to communicate to professionals and to the public. There has been no shortage of press on the topic over the last 20+ years. And while a majority of americans now believe that the earth is warming, the message about why isn’t really getting across. A recent poll found that 65% of people did not feel that human activity was to blame or weren’t sure. Worse, when John Keller, a colleague of mine at the University of Arizona, asked a group of undergraduates the best way to combat global warming in a multiple-choice survey, the top answer was by picking up beach trash. This does not bode well for the future.

Obviously, part of the problem is that many environmental causes, from pollution to overfishing to the ozone layer to global warming, have become conflated in the public’s mind. However, this hasn’t stopped concerted action in the past. For instance, the Montreal protocols of the 1980s that sought to curb the emission of CFCs and preserve the ozone layer was passed easily and by any standard has been wildly successful. So what is it that makes global warming different? Here are a few possible reasons which together suggest a “perfect storm” of confusion and inaction of sorts. I’ll cover reasons both why it is complicated to convince people and why it is difficult to spur them to action:

1) Complexity. The concept of a heat-trapping gas producing an effect similar to that inside your car on a hot summer’s day isn’t a difficult one. It’s when you get to projected effects that the mind starts to boggle; stronger hurricanes, less rain in some places, more rain in others, warmer climate in some places, colder in others, to say nothing of the biological effects real and claimed. As such, it’s very difficult to say with precision what the effect will be on a person living in a particular place and to measure that effect. This contrasts with ozone degradation where you can take someone out in the sun in a well-mapped area of depletion and show them that they burn more easily.

2) Size of the effect and Natural Cycles. Catastrophic increase in temperatures from today’s levels could be as little as a few °C. That’s less than the difference between night and day, less than the difference between yesterday and today, and much less than the difference between summer and winter. I’m sure that you could get almost anyone to agree that an increase in temperatures of 30°C would be bad, but getting people to believe that such a small change could be devastating is difficult. Worse, the increase is not monotonic; it’s not as if global warming will add 2°C to the daily high every day. Instead some years will be colder, in fact some decades will be colder than the decade before, even though the trend is towards higher temperatures. Thus, some preferentially use the moniker “climate change” since any change in the climate, heating or cooling, can then be attributed to the effect without confusion.

3) The challenge of thinking Long-term. By and large human beings are not used to thinking long term, especially not in terms of hundreds of years, our brains just aren’t built that way. This means that it is very difficult to avoid processes which are slow to build, even if we suspect that there could be a runaway or tipping-point effect out there. The same is true of hundred-year floods and storms. Eventually, the cultural memory of the event recedes.

4) Global Reach. If you put together a group of friends to clean up trash in the local park, you see immediate benefits in your life and the lives of those around you. However, global warming can only be combatted on a global scale, and we naturally feel less kinship the farther we go from our own community. Furthermore, there is the spectre that actions you take may in fact cause detriment to your own personal quality of life, even though they will benefit the planet overall.

5) Cost. Unlike CFC reduction, which was a relatively small change, economically, reducing the world’s carbon footprint is a monumental task. It will cost trillions to implement and change our daily lives. Potentially, it will change the job market and sap the economies of those countries that make it a priority, versus those who do not. This is true even though we will all rise or fail collectively. Since the cost to change is so high, the standard of proof demanded is thus correspondingly higher than for any other scientific issue.

6) Politics. Not surprisingly, the issue has also become a political one in which parties exploit public sentiment for and against global warming as a wedge issue. In December there was an entire episode of the McLaughlin group dedicated to the topic which discussed only the horse-trading around the issue and nothing of substance. You’re more likely to hear about global warming as a positive for energy security then for environmental reasons in the political sphere these days.

All of this makes global warming a hard nut to crack. I certainly don’t have all the answers. As a scientist I will continue to do my best to educate wherever possible. But things are starting to look a bit better. Attitudes towards wasteful behavior are changing and more technologies are coming online that can get us through. For instance, the world’s largest emitter of GHGs, China, is also the world’s largest investor in photovoltaics. That bodes well.

But I do not wish to encourage those who would try to convince by false claims or facile arguments. In particular, one famous youtube video shows a man making the following argument (“never refuted!”) which I have paraphrased: that because the possible consequences of global warming are so dire, it behoves us to spend mightily to prevent it whether or not we know if or why it will happen, or how bad it will be. How much should we spend? He doesn’t elaborate.

Unfortunately, governments and citizens are in the business of managing finite resources. Thus, money supplied to one cause has to come from somewhere else. Bjorn Lomborg, derided in many circles as “one of the greatest opponents of global warming,” does in fact list it as one of the most serious problems facing the planet today. However, as he says, there are many better ways to spend that capital that could have a larger impact on alleviating human suffering; a few hundred million to provide access to fresh water for everyone, even less to provide vaccinations, just to name a few. That’s the kind of calculated, sober and rational thinking the gravity of this topic deserves.

As a side note, why does a planetary scientist care? Because understanding the climate of the earth, how it works and what it has done in the past, may be the key to unlocking the past history of the climates of the terrestrial planets in general. For Mars this is an important problem. Did the faint young sun permit liquid water, and perhaps life to exist? The sinuous channels, deltas, and chemical/morphological evidence from the MER rovers say yes. But we don't know how long those conditions persisted. As well, we do not know if the large swings we predict in climate today could make it clement again for life on 100,000-year timescales. If so, then our chances for finding life on Mars are much better!

As well, if we wish to live on the surface of Mars one day, we will need to artificially induce global warming there. By knowing exactly what portion of the current trend on the Earth is explained by anthropological activities, we can more effectively warm Mars or determine if it is even possible (One study by Chris MacKay suggests that it would be quite difficult). This concept is known as Terraforming.

Geoengineering: Terrestrial Terraforming

A topic that comes up often when considering the long term human exploration of Mars is the concept of Terraforming. Quite literally, terraforming describes direct intervention of human beings to modify the climate of another planet to make it more like the surface of the Earth. This makes a great deal of sense; it’s much easier to explore, build cities and carry out the daily business of living if the surface is warm, radiation levels are low, and the atmosphere is thick and breathable.

Of course the closer you start out to Earth-like conditions, the easier this process is. Terraforming Triton (a moon of Neptune) or Mercury, for instance, would be almost impossible. Even though Mars is just about the best candidate for terraforming in the solar system, it would still require an unprecedented industrial intervention and some creative solutions. Despite this, Mars is unlikely to be the first place where the human race practices terraforming. Instead, we most likely will first try terraforming the Earth itself.

This process goes by the name of geoengineering, but the goals are familiar to anyone who has ever planted and nurtured a garden. The goal is not to maintain your particular patch of ground in its pristine, primordial state, but to mould a viable mini-ecosystem of your own design. To that end gardeners routinely do things like add chemical fertilizer, spray for pests and introduce new species some of which do not even exist in the wild. If part of the garden grows poorly, it can receive special attention. If a particular plant thrives excessively and threatens to overtake the whole, it can be pruned back.

Sometimes gardening is done for pure pleasure, but other times it comes out of necessity. Removing dry overburden in forests reduces the fire hazard. Controlling the types of plants living close by can help reduce the number of pests or the ease of spread of disease. It can also be the means by which a resource is protected, such as in Japan in the late 1600s when silviculture began as a way to preserve and ration the use of different kinds of wood.

This last point brings up the subject of a closed environment. If the Japanese had had easy access to wood from abroad, they likely would have not have taken such stewardship of their own forests. Like late 17th century Japan, the Earth is itself an island in the solar system for which we need to take up environmental stewardship. Human beings have proved capable of changing the climate through our activities and we need to be careful how we wield this power.

But this doesn’t mean that the Earth, its surface and its inhabitants need to revert to some primal, wild state. Instead we need to evaluate the current state of the planet, how it is changing, and how we would like it to be. Since the costs of global warming will potentially be high, it is important to mitigate this risk. But reducing our CO2 emissions may not the only way to prevent a warming of the surface. Recently, the Copenhagen Consensus and others have begun examining the possibility of using technology on a large scale to counteract the effects of global warming. You can read their most recent report here: http://fixtheclimate.com/uploads/tx_templavoila/PP_Climate_Engineering_Pielke_v.1.0.pdf.

In this report they comment on the viability of inducing cooling changes to the Earth’s climate system, including the wide dispersal of aerosols (which can affect the amount of sunlight striking the surface both directly and as condensation nuclei for clouds) as well as capture and sequestration of carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere. One danger here is that the Earth is a complicated system and so the feedbacks resulting from the implementation of any of these ideas is not necessarily well understood.

But this sort of positive mitigation is politically attractive and some of the ideas are very intriguing. For instance, if you were to convert CO2 from the atmosphere into biofuel for a vehicle by using a process powered by a renewable source such as solar energy, such a vehicle would be carbon-neutral.

Either way, given that we are on the cusp of having the technological power to geoengineer the Earth, it is up to us to use this power wisely. As we know from Easter Island's example, island systems can be delicate. But we shouldn't shy away from using it and from creating the world we want to have instead of just recreating what has come before.

Further Reading: “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed” by Jared Diamond has a great account of Japan siviliculture and discusses how societies who responsably take control of their environment can have good outcomes. (I should mention that “Guns, germs and steel” is also a really good read)