We’ve been hearing it for years. “If we don’t address climate change, our grandkids will bear the consequences of our actions.”
Ironically, the whole “grandkids” mantra is still being used today, a way to pass the concern about the potential for climate catastrophe off to some future generation, like a hot potato we throw into the hands of the unsuspecting person beside us, alleviated that we no longer have to bear the heat in the palms of our fragile hands.
But there’s something that has yet to register in the minds of many people, the fact that we are now those “grandkids”, and that hot potato has gotten too heavy to pass on to anyone else.
At the time I am writing this article, last month (April 2024) was the hottest month on record for the planet since records began. It was also the 11th consecutive month of record warmth on the entire globe. Meanwhile, just this month (May 2024), howler monkeys have been dropping dead from the trees in Mexico from heatstroke amidst an unprecedented heat wave, and record breaking floods have wrought havoc on southern Brazil, leaving thousands of people homeless, stranded, and without food.
This is only a small handful of the extraordinary climate related calamities that have taken place across the planet since the beginning of 2024, and it appears things are just ramping up. Ever since the 1960’s, each following decade has been warmer than the last, and according to NASA climatologist James Hansen, the rate of warming has jumped by 50% since 2010.
In 2016, the first legally binding international treaty on climate change, known as the Paris Agreement, held various industrialized nations accountable for their carbon footprint, with the goal of limiting warming to below 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. This number has been widely regarded by scientists as the point where the Earth’s climate system could go into disarray, causing widespread damage from excessive heatwaves, floods, monster storms, and more.
Many scientists have stated that if we don’t “act now” we could reach this limit by “the end of the century”, another attempt to catapult that hot potato into some distant, seemingly abstract place in time, the “end of the century” that most people today don’t seem too concerned about because, well, that’s not in “our” time, it’s in “their” time, those future “grandkids” of ours (or perhaps even the grandkids of our grandkids in this case).
But something a little (perhaps a lot) scary is happening now, it appears we are already touching that 1.5 degree limit at this very moment, in 2024, a good seven and a half decades before the previously anticipated 2100.
No, this isn’t some gradual, linear phenomenon that only “our grandkids”, or future generations somewhere down the line (or polar bears in some far-off icy place where Santa Claus lives) have to worry about. It’s not something distant from us in time or space, as the “grandkids” people keep saying, it’s here and now and it’s getting much worse much sooner than most people are willing to accept.
“If we don’t act now…”
There’s also a problem with the proverbial “if we don’t act now” that usually ends or finishes with something about “our grandkids”, and that is the simple fact that we never really acted before, and we just keep going, and we are probably at a point where even if we do “act now” to limit our carbon emissions, it may very well be a case of too little too late.
Here’s why.
For one, it usually takes a decade or more for a single emission of C02 to have its maximum warming effect on our planet, which means the warming we are experiencing today is from emissions released into the atmosphere shortly after people thought the world was going to end because of the Mayan calendar, Barack Obama was still in his first term, and Amy Winehouse still refused to go to rehab.
This means that even if we stopped polluting today, the heating effect of the emissions released yesterday wouldn’t even be felt until around the mid 2030’s.
There’s more.
In 2013, research from Princeton University published in the journal Nature Climate Change stated that it could take many decades, even up to a century or even more, for temperatures to go down even if all human industrial activities, which started this mess, suddenly came to a screeching halt.
Then we have the feedback loops, or what we can nicely call the gift that keeps on giving.
One such feedback loop comes from the melting sea ice in the North Pole. For millions of years, the ice cover over the Arctic Ocean has normally accumulated snow, lots of it. All that snow reflects much of the solar radiation hitting the Earth back into space, keeping the entire planet relatively cool. This is known as the albedo effect.
But as human activities warm the planet, the Arctic is warming four times faster, and as the Arctic ice melts away, less solar radiation is reflected back into space, and more is absorbed into the open ocean, accelerating global warming.
Then there’s the issue of the melting permafrost, or ground that remains frozen year-round in places like Siberia, Greenland, Alaska, and the Canadian Arctic. This permafrost is thawing at a much faster rate than scientists previously thought. The melting Earth in these areas is already causing damage as roads and entire buildings have collapsed into the ground, which had previously been frozen for thousands of years, until now.
Over 1,500 gigatons of carbon is stored in the world’s permafrost. That’s twice as much as is currently in the atmosphere. As the permafrost thaws, bacteria break down the organic matter that has been there for thousands of years, and that’s how even more C02 and methane are gradually unleashed into the atmosphere, trapping even more solar radiation and warming the planet even faster, which has the potential to raise global temperatures by an additional 0.5C.
An additional 0.5 degrees may sound modest, but it’s enough to wreak havoc on our planetary climate systems.
The global heating we are currently experiencing, which began as the result of human industrial activities -and may now have taken on a life of its own- is also causing more wildfires, which produce smoke and, of course, more planet warming greenhouse gas emissions, which heats the planet even more, which produces more water vapor from the warming oceans, which also traps more solar radiation, warming the planet even more, which melts more permafrost, which releases more methane, which produces more heat, which causes more wildfires, which produces more heat, which produces more water vapor…
As you can probably see, yes, things are worse than most people can possibly fathom.
So why do so many media outlets and even some climate scientists continue to insist that it’s our “grandkids” that will be affected “if we don’t act now”? Is there some kind of malicious global conspiracy to keep us all in the dark?
Not exactly.
I’d say it has more to do with a kind of collective denial. In some ways it’s the product of ignorance on the part of the mainstream media, in other ways it’s irrationality on the part of scientists, while in others it’s well planned, a way to keep hope alive and prevent humanity from adding more fuel to the fire by providing the option that we may still save ourselves if we stop now, and if it is too late, at least things won’t be that bad for now, it’ll only be bad for “our grandkids”.
Indeed, denial is an unfortunate part of human nature in the face of inconvenient truths.
In this case, no matter how stifling or unavoidable that hot potato gets, we’ll always try to figure out a way to pass it on to someone else, and “our grandkids” seem to be the perfect target, even if they’re just imaginary puppets from a future that doesn’t look so good.
