Brave Blue Words

Climate is what you expect; weather is what you get – unless the climate is changing faster than predicted in even the worst case scenarios. Then you don’t know what to expect and all bets are off as to what you’ll get.

Changing the Earth’s climate on a global scale by rapidly increasing the abundance and proportions of multiple greenhouse gases is an action without precedent in the Earth’s history. Roger Revelle of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography wrote back in 1957: “human beings are now carrying out a large-scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future.” At the time, he was more curious than concerned but his words have become an eerie and ominous reminder of exactly how little we know about the consequences of our actions. Unfortunately, even the best models in the world can only give us approximations – unless we act to avert the worse impacts of climate change, we will only know for sure what they are when we experience them. What people fail to realize when they read about the latest ‘doomsday’ scenario being discussed by scientists is that the most widely-accepted predictions about climate change are, without exception, underestimates of the scale, severity, and pace of its impacts. Scientists are by nature a cautious and skeptical lot. They do not publicize and disseminate ideas broadly or collectively unless they are really convinced. Really, really convinced.

There is a lot of information and misinformation out there regarding climate change. I’ll be writing about it because climate change is the most significant, far-reaching and long-lasting phenomenon in human history. And it entirely of our making. Because of the greenhouse gases that we have already emitted into the atmosphere, most notably CO2, we are already committed to a certain amount of warming and its effects, unless we can engineer the removal of these gases from the atmosphere on a massive scale. Although there is some talk of such actions, there is no known technique or technology capable of doing so at this time. That does not mean that we should do nothing, that it is already too late. Acting now can help avert the worst impacts. Some actions, such as reducing short-lived pollutants or SLPs (methane, black carbon and troposphere ozone) may even buy us time to put more comprehensive emissions reductions into place. SLPs are an interest of mine – you will be reading a lot more about them on this site in the future. I will also write quite a bit about the impacts and consequences of climate change in the Arctic and at the “Third Pole,” the ice-covered Himalayan region.