After a quarter-century of steady progress in our understanding of the science and politics of climate change, why has there been so little concrete action? Even ratification of the Kyoto Protocol – the Holy Grail of the climate action movement – stirred only a slight headwind to impede the freight train of climate change.
A simple explanation holds that society is grinding its way through an enormously challenging problem, one with contentious ethical, political, social, and economic dimensions.
The unprecedented role of human influence, entrenched financial interests, weak societal mechanisms for addressing multi-generational issues, and efforts to refine the complex science – all have delayed action.
But perhaps we have trapped ourselves with the wrong perspective. From the start of the public debate, climate change has been delicately portrayed as a one-time problem – a dragon that can be slain and discarded. This approach insidiously sets the tone for everything from cost/benefit calculations to policy options, creating the false hope of a simple way out.
If you take a step back and reassess, the evidence suggests that our climate dragon is likely immortal. Humanity’s increasing technological sophistication and our growing population leave little hope that we will ever fully eliminate human climate influence.
If not greenhouse gas emissions, it will be ocean acidification, land cover degradation, invasive species, or something even more challenging. If we have learned nothing else during the past quarter-century, it is that humans do indeed have such power over the Earth.
We are also beginning to recognize publicly what scientists have long understood: natural climate variation itself can have enormous and potentially undesirable societal consequences. While the potential impacts of human climate influence are sobering, our focus on human influence is misguided if it blinds us to the consequences of natural change.
The abnormal cold of the “Little Ice Age” from about 1350 to 1850 altered the course of world events – possibly delaying the settlement of America and driving the onset of the industrial revolution.
Ominously, ice core records warn us that climate’s relative stability over the 10,000 years or so since the last ice age is not the norm. How soon will climate return to its historically more erratic state – and could our own inadvertent influence be providing the trigger?
Perhaps our lack of concrete policy progress reflects a hidden defeatism – a subconscious recognition that we are unlikely to vanquish climate change the way our imaginations hope. The uncomfortable truth is that climate change can not be “fixed” once and for all. It has become an inescapable companion of civilization. The need to deal with it will be an ongoing function of society.
Climate change ultimately reflects the confluence of human and natural influences; future policies will be expected to address both. It may take time, but we will eventually accept this new partnership with nature.
Both extremes of the climate debate loathe this thought. Climate action stalwarts reject any solution that codifies permanent human influence. Skeptics and opponents of action are uncomfortable with any approach that implies the need for ongoing attention. As a result, the treatment of climate change as an open-ended issue has been essentially absent from the debate.
Recognizing that climate change is a long-term issue could break today’s policy stalemate. However, accepting this notion also exposes uncomfortable ethical and policy dilemmas. If human climate influence is bad, how can natural change be acceptable? And if natural change is undesirable, should we attempt to alter it as we are doing with human-caused change?
The conclusion – that we must somehow begin to actively influence, and even manage, climate – is hard to swallow. It clashes with our almost instinctive belief that nature is best untouched by humanity.
Yet humanity’s touch is already pervasive: the global patchwork of agriculture, the accelerating loss of species, and the ozone layer we altered. The reality of nature today is that preservation and intervention share an uncomfortable bed. With climate, the need in practice to avoid dangerous change may simply outweigh the argument in principle for avoiding human influence.
Can the climate dragon be domesticated? Perhaps only future historians will provide the answer. But if we want to make concrete progress, it is clearly time to rethink our approach.
William B. Gail is Director of Strategic Development within the Public Sector Product Group at Microsoft Corporation in Boulder, Colorado.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is an online-only column and has not been edited.
