END- OF- THE- CENTURY PROJECTED IMPACT OF CLIMATE CHANGE

Projections of rising temperatures depend on which scenario is taken. The scenario I used in Chapters 9 and 11 to represent business as usual (A2 in Fig. 9.8) has a best estimate of a 3.4°C increase in temperature, with a likely range of 2°C– 5.4°C. A1F1 is even higher. The global rise in sea level for the A2 scenario is projected at 0.5 m; it is 0.6 m for A1F1. These numbers are global averages. Temperature increases over land are projected to be higher than those over sea, and the temperature increase at the poles is projected to be much higher than in the tropics. Th e temperature in the Arctic could increase by as much as 7°C. Large parts of the Arctic would no longer have ice year- round. Th e Thermohaline ocean circulation (Chapter 7), with its large impact on regional climate change, is predicted to slow down toward the end of the century.

Committed Warming

“Committed warming” is a term used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to describe the situation that will develop once the world stabilizes the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases. The climate will continue to get warmer due to the thermal inertia of the oceans and ice sheets and the long time scale needed to reach full thermal equilibrium. Full equilibrium needs equilibration of the lower atmosphere (a fast process), upper ocean (a few years), and deep ocean (as long as thousands of years). All three determine the climate.

Table 16.1 shows the onset of some of the main impacts predicted to take place as a result of warming.

GENOCIDES AND THE JUST WORLD HYPOTHESIS

W hy do we tend to underestimate risks relating to natural hazards when a catastrophic event has not occurred for a long time? If the catastrophic events are preventable, can this lead to catastrophic inaction?

The key predictions of the impact of climate change are the significant extinction of ecosystems around the world, a rise in sea level that on average can exceed half a meter, and a major redistribution of fresh water availability. How can we even think about genocide here? We think about genocide in terms of actions that man is doing to man. In the Merriam-Webster definition given previously, the collective inhabitants of the planet are not explicitly stated. Two reasons for the omission might be that global destruction of people is fortunately rare and global destruction does not leave much room for destroyers. The concept of self- inflicted genocide correctly addresses the issue that we are both the destroyer and the destroyed (some of us more than others). A historical precedent might be the black death, which peaked in Europe in the middle of the 14th century and killed about 30%– 60% of Europe’s population. Th e most probable cause of the black death is an epidemic of the bubonic plague carried by black rats. This epidemic is considered by some to be the first Malthusian crisis, discussed in Chapter 12. The epidemic, believed to have started in central Asia, had a worldwide death toll of approximately 75 million (out of an estimated population of half a billion). It was not a self- inflicted genocide because it was not “deliberate and systematic.” To continue with the business- as- usual environmental scenario, however, does qualif y as “deliberate and systematic” and is projected to result in massive, indiscriminate, global destruction. The similarities between the Holocaust (or any past genocide) and climate change are not in the events themselves— they are obviously diff erent. The similarities are in the consequences of the “deliberate and systematic” destruction of large groups of people. But there is a basic difference: the Holocaust and other genocidal acts we read about happened in the past. The impact of climate change is predicted to take place in the future with the timeline and uncertainties discussed throughout this book. The similarities are obviously not there. To find the similarities on this level, we have to put ourselves in a similar place with respect to the Holocaust as we are with respect to climate change. The extensive Holocaust literature contains good, personal descriptions of the uncertainties and confusion in communities of Holocaust victims before and during the genocide. A good focal point is Samuel Kassow ’s recently published book Who Will Write Our History?,6 which describes the situation in the Warsaw ghetto between the prewar period and the destruction of the ghett o after the 1943 ghetto uprising. Half a million people were packed into the ghetto ready to be sent to death camps by the Germans. Out of half a million, about 30,000 are known to have survived. The book focuses on the historian Emanuel Ringelblum and his organization Oyneg Shabes. Its objective was to mobilize contemporary intellectuals to write about their experiences and hide the material from the Nazis with the hope that the Germans would eventually lose the war and the history of the period would be evaluated through the eyes of the victims. Indeed, after the war, significant portions of the archives were found undamaged, and Kassow ’s book summarizes their contents. Rumors about, and even eyewitnesses to, the camps were abundant. Yet the active resistance was minimal. Th e optimists carried the day throughout the prewar and war periods, and the result is known. Because we are currently at a similar fork in terms of our collective decision making (at least following the analysis of many of us), it helps to try to understand the reasons for this slow action.

My wife, an experimental psychologist and now the dean of research at my college, pointed out that social psychology has a possible explanation for inaction in the face of dire threats, mediated by a strong need to believe that we live in a “just world,” a belief deeply held by many individuals that the world is a rational, predictable, and just place. The “just world” hypothesis also posits that people believe that beneficiaries deserve their benefits and victims their suff ering.7 The “just world” concept has some similarity to rationale choice theory, which underlies current analysis of microeconomics and other social behavior. Rationality in this context is the result of balancing costs and benefits to maximize personal advantage. It underlies much of economic modeling, including that of stock markets, where it goes by the name “effi cient market hypothesis,” which states that the existing share price incorporates and reflects all relevant information. The need for such frameworks emerges from attempts to make the social sciences behave like physical sciences with good predictive powers. Physics is not much diff erent. A branch of physics called statistical mechanics, which is responsible for most of the principles discussed in Chapter 5 (conservation of energy, entropy, etc.), incorporates the basic premise that if nature has many options for action and we do not have any reason to prefer one option over another, then we assume that the probability of taking any action is equal to the probability of taking any other. For large systems, this assumption works beautifully and enables us to predict macroscopic phenomena to a high degree of accuracy. In economics, a growing area of research is dedicated to the study of exceptions to the rational choice theory, which has shown that humans are not very rational creatures. This area, behavioral economics, includes major contributions by psychologists.

In focusing on the unthinkable, it is helpful to ask why despite so much good evidence (much of it reviewed in this book), there has been so much resistence and even rejection of the work of scientists on global warming. Some recent research has tested whether resistence on the part of individuals to accepting the science behind global warming and climate change, and the predictions of what may happen in the future, could be related to people’s need to maintain a belief in a “just world.” The hypothesis of the study, by Matthew Feinberg and Robb Willer,8 was that information about the potentially tragic impact of global warming may be a serious threat to individuals with a strong belief in a just world. Communications that emphasize the dire consequences of failing to act to rein in global warning may paradoxically shift individuals with strong “just world” beliefs into denial of climate change rather than energizing them to accept the problem and consider ways to address it. The study involved giving college students a standardized questionnaire that tested strength of believe in a just world. Several weeks later, they were randomly assigned to read one of two versions of a short piece that appeared to be a news article. Until the final paragraphs, the articles were identical. Some of the students got a version in which the final paragraphs emphasized the terrible devastation and potentially apocalyptic consequences from global warming. Another group emphasized possible solutions to stem global warming, including the potential for application of technologies that might slow and even reverse the conditions leading to climate change. Two test questions were given to each group—one asked how much people believed that global warming was actually happening, and the other asked how likely they thought it was that the science on global warming was wrong. The results showed that the greater the participant’s belief in a just- world, the more skeptical they became about global warming when exposed to the dire message. However, while the dire message led to increased skepticism about the science behind global warming predictions, the more positive message focusing on solutions lead to a decrease in skepticism about the underlying science for climate change.

In this chapter and throughout the book, I have used dire phrases such as “genocide,” “existential,” and “Venusian future” that might make some people deny the possibility of climate change. This would be very a unfortunate outcome, as the main goal of the book is to induce readers to see that action is possible and can potentially mitigate the predicted outcomes, if not delayed too long. My goal has been to lay the foundations of principles to help readers motivated to make up their own minds about the validity of a range of arguments about causes and actions. Specific steps, though oft en difficult ones, have been described that can be taken now to avoid the possibility of a catastrophic future. There is too much at stake for communication about the threats about climate change to backfire and have the opposite effect on the initiation of individual and collective actions that are the means to preserve our planet.

UNCERTAINTY AND INSURANCE

Can we insure the survival of the planet as a habitable environment? If the answer is yes, then who and how will pay the premium? If climate change is just a big catastrophic event, then the mechanism of financial preparation should not be much different than the insurance of present catastrophic events. The trouble is that we are not very good at insuring catastrophic events. The present situation of flood insurance is a good example. In the United Kingdom, flood insurance is provided by private insurance, but in the United States it comes through a federally backed insurance system. In France and Spain flood insurance is bundled with other natural perils into a national pooling arrangement, and in Holland it is completely unavailable. The insurance industry is heavily involved in the debate on climate change. “Climate change is a clear business opportunity for the insurance industry,” declared Shinzo Abe, former prime minister of Japan, at the Geneva Association meeting in Kyoto on May 29, 2009.9

The main reason is defensive— the worst thing that can happen to the insurance industry is to grossly underestimate risk. If the planet is becoming progressively more risky after the policy is drafted, then the industry will lose. The objective of insurers is to form a community of the insured where premium payments are sufficient to cover the cost of repairing damage. Th e profitability of the insurance industry critically depends on its ability to assess risk, defined as

loss potential × occurrence fr equency.

To illustrate the risk– premium dynamics of the insurance business, the famous Swiss reinsurance company Swiss Re uses a dice game analogy.10 The number on the die is the severity of the loss; the frequency is how often the number is rolled. “Catastrophe” is defined as the point at which a 6 is rolled 10 consecutive times or more. We can calculate the probability exactly for such an event taking place, but are we willing to pay against such a low probability event? Insurance is against future losses, not past losses. For past losses, we rely only on sympathy.

Natural catastrophes such as major floods or earthquakes remain unpredictable in spite of huge technical and scientific advances. According to Swiss Re there is a tendency to underestimate risks relating to natural hazards when a catastrophic event has not occurred for a long time (the “just world” hypothesis again).

The loss potential (i.e., direct human loss, not planetary loss) of climate change is a direct function of population growth and gross domestic product (GDP) growth and is thus predictable (Special Report on Emission Scenarios [SRES] scenarios). The issue, however, is the frequency of the occurrence. One prediction of the climate change model is the increased intensity of extreme events. Is this prediction solid enough to put our money on (or rather strong enough for the insurance and reinsurance companies to put our money on?). Local catastrophic losses can be put in a pool along with a large number of separate geographical locations with the assumption that the frequency of occurrence in these locations is independent. They must include willingness to pay by policy holders in the pool formation. If there is a tendency to underestimate risks relating to natural hazards when a catastrophic event has not occurred for a long time, then it is difficult to find payers. One possible solution is differentiated- premium pricing on a global scale. With sovereign states in control, how this will work within the confines of a regulated insurance environment remains an issue.

ADAPTATION

We have difficulty believing in long- term, self- inflicting, global catastrophic events. We do not want to pay for insurance against such events. Our confidence in our political leadership is not strong enough to facilitate effective top-down approaches that require large changes in the way we live our lives—or order us to pay for such insurance. Such an att itude translates into difficulties mitigating the environmental stresses that result from the way that we support ourselves (mainly, but not exclusively) through our energy choices. We have two options left : do nothing and hope that the predictions are wrong, or try to adapt.

Adaptation requires different dynamics than mitigation. As we have seen, mitigation requires changes in the energy supply. The required changes must be global and have direct impact on the price we pay for energy. If we allow for free choice of energy sources, we must price the environmental stresses we produce by using our present supply. Because rich countries are the largest energy users per person, they will be required to pay the most. Pricing environmental stresses is a top-down approach that requires governmental decisions and coordinated global decisions. Adaptation, on the other hand, requires decisions by local governments and individuals. The amount of press that local governments are getting for taking adaptation steps is thankfully considerably lower than the corresponding mitigation att empts. Adaptation is targeted at reducing vulnerability and increasing resilience. Adaptation implies strong physical constraints on future developments for poor and rich alike. In his recent book, Climatopolis, 11 Matthew Kahn notes that mitigation is failing and that “we are unlikely to invent a magical new technology that allows us to live well without producing greenhouse gases.” He develops a scenario in the future of our cities in a hotter, more urbanized, and more populated world. In his scenario, adaptation is king—“billions of households will seek strategies for protecting their families from harm. Some will move to higher grounds that are unlikely to flood; others will seek out products ranging from more energy- efficient air conditioning to higher quality building materials to protect themselves from climate change’s blows. . . . We will be ‘saved’ by our multiple self-interests.”11 Kahn is an economist, and the rationale choice theory previously discussed is in full bloom in his book. He argues that destruction often triggers a boom with examples such as Hiroshima and Nagasaki after World War II and New York City after September 11, 2001. Timing, however, is not discussed.

The required adaptation and what, therefore, must be done, short of moving people from one place to another, is not controversial. The timing and the details are uncertain because here one cannot work through such scenarios— things must be done to adapt to coming risks. We generally agree, however, that adaptation must be flexible. To put it differently— adaptation can rely only generally on long-term simulation; it must rely on real, local measurements. The stresses are known— the infrastructure is constructed with materials with properties sensitive to the temperature. Design standards should be recalibrated to refl ect the risks of climate change. With the changing standards, the codes for every piece of infrastructure must be revisited. The uncertainties in insurance policies discussed in the previous section must be addressed. Issues of liabilities must be addressed through changes in the legal structure. Risks associated with the effects of climate change on cities’ water supplies, drainage, and wastewater management must be addressed. Changes in precipitation patterns, the rise in sea level, and more intense and frequent extreme events must be taken into account. Historical climate precedents are no longer valid for long- term environmental planning. Local governments are much better equipped to address many of these issues than national governments, and many local governments are responding to the challenge. Th is is encouraging. Half the world’s population now lives in cities, a share that is expected to grow to 70% by 2050. In terms of adaptation, cities count. According to the World Bank, 90% of the global urban population in 2050 will reside in what are now known as developing countries.12 Cities are prospering in coastal areas and are therefore vulnerable. Out of the 20 megacities (defined with population greater than 10 million people), 15 are in coastal zones defined as low flooding zones. New York City, where I live, is considered to be at the forefront in the preparation process. PlaNYC2030 includes a comprehensive summary of the initiatives and the progress the city is making in preparation for climate change and other environmental challenges.13 One of the reports, titled Climate Change Adaptation in New York City, published on the site in 2010, summarizes present and future efforts in adapting to the new environment.

Should we adopt Kahn’s prospective in Climatopolis and give up on mitigation and use adaptation as a reasonable alternative? Two main reasons force us to reject this option: Th e first reason is futility. A quick look at Table 16.1 indicates that most of the stresses are not self- limiting. Once we reach the tipping points, they accelerate. Most biological systems, including humans, have a very narrow window for survival. Adaptations (including technological ones) that allow them to survive outside these windows are evolutionary processes that take a long time and will take place through selection processes that will require massive extinctions of the less adaptable. The second reason is that adaptations, especially technological ones, need resources. Most likely, rich countries (or rich individuals) most responsible for the failure of mitigation will have the best chance of acquiring the means for successful adaptations. Th is will not go unnoticed by the global majority and will most likely result in a global upheaval. Th is is one of the main reasons why climate change has attracted the attention of the US defense establishment, as was discussed in Chapter 13.

Adaptation is not a substitute for mitigation, but it is a necessary intermediary supplement to take us through the transition.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

Arnold Toynbee wrote that civilizations die from suicides, not murder.14 The predicted consequences of business- as- usual environmental scenarios over the next 70 years could be imprecise in some details and even slightly wrong in timing. Still, it is clear that once we pass a critical point in the ability of the planet to adapt to the accumulation of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, the consequences amount to a global genocide— a self- inflicted genocide. We know how to mitigate this possible future Holocaust, but we need our collective will to do so. The top-down approach through the political system is facing many obstacles. Th e bott om- up approach through the educational system might provide badly needed help.