melt season, in which vast stretches of Arctic ice the size of
Florida vanished almost weekly at times, a credible new
estimate from the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey,
California, indicated there could be zero—zero —summer ice
in the Arctic as early as 2013.
Five precious years. An eye-blink away.
So the Arctic doomsday prediction has gone from 2070 to
2013 in just eleven months of scienti>c reporting. This means
far more than the likely extinction of polar bears from
drowning and starvation. A
world where the North Pole
is just a watery dot in an
unbroken expanse of dark
ocean implies a planet that,
well, is no longer planet
Earth. It’s a world that is destined to be governed by radically di=erent weather patterns. And it’s a world that’s
arriving, basically, tomorrow,
if the U.S. Naval Postgraduate
School has it right.
How could this be hap-
pening to us? Why is this not
dominating every minute of every presidential debate?
Actually it’s the so-called feedback loops that have tripped up
scientists so badly, causing the experts to wildly misjudge the
speed of the climate crash. Having never witnessed a planet overheat before, no one quite anticipated the geometric rate of change.
To cite one example, when that brilliantly white Arctic ice melts to
blue ocean, it takes with it a huge measure of solar re?ectivity,
which increases sunlight absorption and feeds more warmth back
into the system, amplifying everything dramatically. And as
northern forests across Canada continue to die en masse due to
warming, they switch from being net absorbers of CO2 to net
emitters when forest decomposition sets in. And as tundra melts
all across Siberia, it releases long-buried methane, a greenhouse
gas twenty times more powerful than even CO2. And so on and
so on and so on. Like the ear-splitting shriek when a microphone
gets too close to its ampli>er, literally dozens of major feedback
loops are screeching into place worldwide, all at the same time,
ushering in the era of runaway climate change.
“Only in the past >ve years, as researchers have learned more
about the way our planet works, have some come to the conclusion that changes probably won’t be as smooth or as gradual as
[previously] imagined,” writes Fred Pearce in his new book With
Speed and Violence: Why Scientists Fear Tipping Points in Climate
Change. “We are in all probability already embarked on a roller-coaster ride of lurching and sometimes brutal change.”
Global warming is no longer a hundred-year problem
requiring a hundred-year solution. It’s not even a >fty-year
problem. New data and recent events clearly reveal it’s a
right-here, right-now, white-hot crisis requiring dramatic and
comprehensive resolution in the next twenty to thirty years,
with drastic but achievable
changes in energy consumption required
immediately. But even a near-total abandonment of fossil
fuels might not be enough
to save us, given how fast
the planet is now warming.
So the rising whisper
even among many environmentalists is this: we
might also have to develop
some sort of life-saving
atmospheric shield. In a
controversial but decidedly
plausible approach called
geo-engineering, we could
do everything from placing giant orbiting mirrors in outer
space to seeding the atmosphere with lots of sulfur dioxide,
basically becoming a “permanent human volcano.” More
on this in a moment.
But >rst, if there’s any good news surrounding the sudden
and unexpected speed of global warming it is this: it’s nobody’s
fault. New evidence shows that we were almost certainly locked
into a course of violent climate snap well before we >rst fully
understood the seriousness of global warming back in the
1980s. Even had we completely unplugged everything twenty
years ago, the momentum of carbon dioxide buildup already
occurring in the atmosphere clearly would have steered us
toward the same disastrous results we’re seeing now.
So we can stop blaming ExxonMobil and Peabody Coal and
the father-son Bush administrations. Their frequently deceitful
lobbying and political stalling over the past twenty years didn’t
wreck the climate. The atmosphere was already wrecked well
before the >rst Bush took o;ce. These staunch conservatives
simply created a “solution delay” that we can—and must—
overcome in a very short time.
The tendency toward denial is still very much with us, of
course. From this point forward, however, there can be no
hesitation and no absolution. In a world of obvious climate
