CLIMATE CRISIS
38 / ROLLING STONE / APRIL 2020
“THE CLIMATE
CRISIS ISN’T
AN ‘EVENT’
OR AN ‘ISSUE.’
IT’S AN ERA,
AND IT’S JUST
BEGINNING....
IT WILL BE
MORE LIKE THE
INDUSTRIAL
REVOLUTION.”
T
HE JAKOBSHAVN GLACIER, on the west coast
of Greenland, is the fastest-moving gla-
cier in the world. It is flowing into the
sea at a rate of about 150 feet per day.
If you fly along the face of it in a he-
licopter, as I did a few years ago, you
can watch slabs of blue ice fall into the
sea every few minutes. They eventually melt into
the North Atlantic, adding almost imperceptibly
to the level of water in the ocean, which push-
es waves a fraction of an inch higher on beaches
around the world — the climate crisis in action.
In the 1990s, Greenland also changed how sci-
entists think about climate change. Until then,
most climate scientists believed the Earth’s cli-
mate was a fairly steady system — that it might
grow warmer or colder, but that changes were
gradual, like water heating up in a pot. Wallace
Broecker, a brash and colorful geochemist at Co-
lumbia University, who died in 2019, hypoth-
esized that changes in the Gulf Stream system
about 14,000 years ago, during a period known
as the Younger Dryas, had caused dramatic tem-
perature swings in the Northern Hemisphere.
Evidence for this was sketchy until the mid-Nine-
ties, when a team of researchers, including Rich-
ard Alley, a paleoclimatologist at Penn State, ex-
tracted a two-mile ice core from the Greenland
ice sheet. By examining the decay of carbon iso-
tope ratios in air bubbles trapped in the ancient
ice, Alley found that at the end of the Younger
Dryas, the temperature in Greenland warmed
by 15 F in less than a decade. It was a remarkable
discovery, which demonstrated that the Earth’s
climate tended to lurch from one steady state
to another. “You might think of the climate as a
drunk,” Alley later explained. “When left alone,
it sits. When forced to move, it staggers.”
Alley’s work revolutionized how scientists
conceptualized changes that are to come. It also
pushed scientists to think about climate risk in
terms of temperature changes, not carbon-emis-
sion rates. In 2001, the IPCC issued its third re-
port, which was far more pointed and urgent
than previous reports. It’s remembered today
mostly for a single graphic, known as “the burn-
ing embers” diagram. It was a simple chart with
five bars that corresponded to five categories
of climate risk, from “Risks of Extreme Weath-
er Events” to “Risks of Large Scale Discontinu-
ities” (such as the rapid melting of the Green-
land and West Antarctic ice sheets). The bars
were shaded from white to yellow to orange to
dark red, depending on the severity of the risk,
which were calculated on a scale from zero to 5
C of warming. “The diagram was revolutionary,”
says Mann. “For the first time, the risks of cli-
mate change were intelligible to someone who
didn’t have a degree in physics.”In 2010, the UNFCCC threw out the old met-
ric of measuring progress by emissions reduc-
tions. Instead, they adopted a goal of stabilizing
warming at less than 2 C (3.6 F), which quickly
became known as the threshold for dangerous
climate change. Where did the 2 C target come
from? Think of it as a rough balance between
what should be done and what can be done.
(“I would avoid thinking about these tempera-
ture targets as ever being based in science,” says
Dessler.) Although a temperature target was
much more coherent to most people than a per-
centage of emissions reductions, it reinforced an
artificial notion that climate change was binary:
Below 2 C of warming, all was good. Above 2 C,
all hell breaks loose. “That is not how the climate
system works,” says Dessler. “Is 1.8 C of warming
better than 2 C? Yes. Is 2 C better than 2.5 C? Yes.
But there is no bright line here.”
Mann’s question, “Dangerous to whom?”
continued to haunt negotiations over climate tar-
gets. The better that scientists understood the
climate system, the clearer it became that even
a warming of 2 C put people in low-lying na-
tions like Bangladesh at risk for increased flood-
ing from rising seas, as well as other climate im-
pacts. Was the 2 C target too high? Was it safe
only for the privileged? The counterargument,
however, was that a climate target needed to
be achievable or nobody would take it serious-
ly. Virtually every study showed that
hitting the 2 C target would require a
Herculean effort by all the industrial-
ized nations of the world.
At the climate talks in Paris in
2015, even the 2 C target was seen as
not strong enough. By then, the im-
pacts of climate change were moving
out of the modeling world and hap-
pening in real time. Greenland and
Antarctica are shrinking “100 years
ahead of schedule,” Alley said. Lead-
ers of small island states like Tuva-
lu and the Maldives argued that the
2 C target was essentially dooming
their nations. They pushed for an
“aspirational goal” of limiting warm-
ing to 1.5 C (2.7 F), which eventually
became embedded in the language
of the Paris Agreement. Thus, 1.5 C
became the new de facto threshold
for dangerous climate change. But
it was clear that the 1.5 C target was more of
a desperate dream than a practical reality. As
one observer in Paris quipped to me, “They
may as well agree that all fairies shall ride uni-
corns too.”THERE MAY BE a climate scientist or energy analyst
somewhere in the world who believes that limit-
ing warming to 1.5 C is doable, but I haven’t met
him or her. Net emissions would need to fall byhalf by 2030, and to zero by 2050. “The level
of action and coordination necessary to limit
global warming to 1.5 C utterly dwarfs anything
that has ever happened on any other large-scale
problem that humanity has ever faced,” jour-
nalist David Roberts wrote on Vox. “The only
analogy that has ever come close to capturing
what’s necessary is ‘wartime mobilization,’ but
it requires imagining the kind of mobilization
that the U.S. achieved for less than a decade
during WWII happening in every large eco nomy
at once, and sustaining itself for the remainder
of the century.”
If we blow past the 1.5 C target, as seems like-
ly, where are we headed? Until recently, the IPCC
had projected a warming of about 4.5 C by the
end of the century if we continue on our current
emissions path. That is truly a horrific number,
one that would render large swaths of the Earth
uninhabitable. But a recent study by Zeke Haus-
father of the Breakthrough Institute in Califor-
nia and Justin Richie of the University of British
Columbia demonstrated that this estimate was
based on unreal projections of coal consump-
tion and other factors. After they reanalyzed the
data, they concluded the business-as-usual sce-
nario may be something more like 3 C. Which
would still be hellish, but less hellish than 4.5 C.
Even if we achieve the target of holding to
2 C, there will be unfathomable changes to
our climate. In 2018, the IPCC pub-
lished a special report that laid out
the differences between a 2 C world
and a 1.5 C world. “I was grumpy
about the idea of the 1.5 report,” says
NASA’s Kate Marvel. “I thought it was
just fan fiction. But it had an unexpect-
edly galvanizing impact on people.”
The report showed that, at 2 C, severe
heat events would become 2.6 times
worse, plant- and vertebrate-species
loss two times worse, insect-species
loss three times worse, and decline
in marine fisheries two times worse.
Instead of 70 percent of coral reefs
dying, 99 percent will die. Many vul-
nerable and low-lying regions would
become uninhabitable and the flow of
refugees would rise dramatically.
Beyond future emissions rates,
there are two big uncertainties on how
fast the climate will warm. One is cli-
mate sensitivity, which is the measure scientists
use to calculate how much the climate will warm
as CO2 increases. It’s tricky to measure, because
as the Earth heats up, it tweaks the climate dy-
namics in subtle ways, changing cloud cover,
wind and rainfall patterns, and ocean circula-
tion, among many other things. And all of this
can impact warming.
According to Hausfather, the real uncertain-
ty lies with clouds, which are notoriously hardContributing editor JEFF GOODELL interviewed
Gov. Jay Inslee for the November issue.