Global temperatures just jumped. Will you?
Several forces are forcing global warming to take off. We're making plans for when political will finally does too.
For decades, we’ve all been that frog in Al Gore’s pot — the one that, because the water is boiling so slowly, doesn’t realize it’s about to get cooked. Now, suddenly, temperatures are spiking, and there are several reasons to believe we could be at the beginning of a new phase of exponential global warming. It’s scary. But is it scary enough to make the frog jump?
Since this temperature spike hasn’t exactly been front page news, I’ll explain. Remember that really far-off 1.5 Celsius (2.7F) level of warming we have to prevent for the sake of our grandchildren? Turns out, we’re already there. The past 12 months were 1.68C above the 1850-1900 baseline. When you look at a graph of global temperatures over time, the past 50 years look like a jet plane taking off. The past one looks like a rocket heading straight up.
Some climate scientists are sounding the alarm — in academic papers. Publicly freaking out is not their job. Other experts caution that the recent spike could be a random outlier, and no one should panic. But climate scientists have been telling us for years about forces they expected would accelerate warming. These include “climate feedback loops” and reduced sun-blocking fossil fuel dust. Now that the accelerated warming we were expecting is here, common sense dictates that we should act as though there’s at least a chance it’s the real thing and not a freak occurrence.
Here’s an example of a climate feedback loop: Ice and snow reflect the sun’s heat away from earth. But global warming reduces the earth’s ice and snow cover, which makes the earth warmer, which melts more ice and snow, and so on. Another is thawing tundra, which releases methane, a greenhouse gas many times more potent than CO2. The more thawing tundra, the more methane in the atmosphere, which thaws more tundra. Forest fires, which release huge quantities of CO2, heat the planet, causing more forest fires. Scientists are still debating whether frozen methane at the bottom of the oceans is melting and entering the atmosphere. Also poorly understood is reduced photosynthesis in oceans, causing less CO2 to be captured and stored at the bottom of the ocean. There are other feedback loops and probably more waiting to be discovered.
Feedback loops are difficult to measure or model accurately. Scientists prudently avoid staking their reputations on them. Nevertheless, James Hanson, one of the most revered climate scientists of the Anthropocene, has documented a significant drop in the average reflectiveness of the earth from reduced ice and snow. If feedback loops are indeed accelerating global warming, then the next few years could reveal warming levels we weren’t expecting for decades.
The reason feedback loops are so scary is not merely that they will speed warming, but that they could shift global warming from a linear to an exponential rise. Again, it’s impossible to prove that this will happen beyond doubt. For fear of being accused of crying wolf, most experts are unwilling to sound the alarm about them. But if feedback loops turn out to be real, and do cause exponential warming in the coming years, there will be no way to undo the damage they caused. We won’t be able to get that frozen methane back into the ocean or put Antarctica back together again.
But wait, there’s more. Several other forces are speeding global warming. Here’s a paradoxical one: as we burn less dirty fossil fuels, we’re causing a one-time boost to global temperatures. This is because fossil fuel particle exhaust lingers in the atmosphere for a few years, cooling the earth by reflecting some of the sun’s energy. Please do not misunderstand: We need to stop burning dirty fuels because they put CO2 into the atmosphere that will remain for hundreds of years. Every year we burn fossil fuels, we’re adding to the CO2 content of the atmosphere, which heats the planet. Coal dust, on the other hand, stays aloft for only days or weeks. The amount of dust, and therefore cooling, remains constant if we keep burning the same amount of fuels. In other words, every ton of CO2 we emit pushes temperatures to new permanent highs, while the cooling effect of coal dust stays the same. We need to stop burning fossil fuels to stop global warming, but when we do, we’re going to get a one-time hit of additional warming because we’ll lose the dust, and the sun will get a tiny bit brighter.
The last warming dynamic I’ll mention is the one more people are used to hearing about: Good old fashioned greenhouse gasses. The problem here is that we’re emitting more than we think. The more scientists look into it, the more it seems we are undercounting the amount of greenhouse gasses we’re putting into the atmosphere. Perhaps the biggest area of undercounting is methane. Methane is up to 84 times more potent as CO2 depending on how you figure it. Methane is natural gas. The world has been switching from coal to natural gas/methane for decades to reduce CO2 emissions and air pollution. It does burn cleaner, but since it’s a gas, it leaks — from pipelines and pipes, from your stove and dryer, from active and abandoned wells. Another source of undercounted greenhouse gasses includes nitrous oxide (it’s 298 times as potent as CO2 and lasts for about 114 years) from overfertilization on farms.
OK, the water in the pot is suddenly getting a lot hotter. And we have good reason to believe that this could be the start of a new phase of exponentially increasing temperatures. So what are we going to do about it?
The world’s big economies are not reducing emissions anywhere near fast enough to avoid catastrophic global warming. That’s true even if we haven’t entered a new phase of exponential warming. But if temperatures are in fact now spiraling, then the catastrophe is already at our doorstep.
What’s worse is that most powerful environmental and climate groups are not demanding solutions big enough to actually avert disaster. Instead, they’re calling for gradual reductions of emissions through mostly indirect mechanisms. Why are committed climate activists fighting for solutions that won’t solve the problem? The answer is that going further would ruin their credibility with the journalists and experts who referee the climate policy debate.
Respected climate journalists and experts cite countless reasons why we can’t move as fast as the coming climate catastrophe demands. They will tell you, for example, that the current broken system of approval and permitting processes makes it impossible to build new wind and solar farms quickly, let alone new nuclear power plants. They’ll tell you labor shortages make it impossible to staff all the new factories and construction projects we need. They’ll tell you it’s not economical to replace many fossil-fuel burning machines and facilities before they’ve reached the end of their life cycle. And they’ll tell you that the politicians in power today are in no mood to entertain grand sweeping plans to transition rapidly to a clean economy.
They are right about all these obstacles in the world as it is today. But all these obstacles have solutions or workarounds. Right now, those solutions are politically impossible — because politicians, experts and advocates are afraid to vouch for them and politicians are afraid to fight for them. It’s another sort of feedback loop!
At some point in the coming years, perhaps very soon, that will all change, and suddenly not only catastrophe but also the will to act will both be at our door. When that moment arrives, we will be living in a new world, with new rules. In that moment, we’ll need detailed and comprehensive plans to build a clean economy as fast as possible that are designed for the new world, not the old. That is the work we’re doing at New Consensus with the Mission for America.
I’ll admit that it can be difficult to get journalists or policy experts interested in this kind of long term thinking and tedious planning — because even though it could be right around the corner, it’s difficult to imagine how or when that new world will ever come. It would be helpful, though, if the arbiters of what is a respectable climate solution could remember how fast the world has been changing lately, and how many of the things they’re fighting for today were taboo just a few years ago.
Take industrial policy. Very recently, if you argued for “bringing back manufacturing” to power the green transition, respectable policy makers and shapers would literally laugh at you. (I know, because I was often the one getting laughed at.) They had reasons it could never work — all real. Then, several developments forced an about face in their thinking: concerns about China’s rise, supply chain failures during COVID, and Trump’s rhetorical embrace of industrial policy. Almost overnight, everyone who mattered in climate policy became a true believer in industrial policy. That change allowed a whole generation of policy wonks, activists, and political leaders to fight for and enact sweeping industrial policy in the Biden administration. (We like to think that our work on the Green New Deal helped too.)
It would be great if the leaders, journalists and advocates who witnessed and participated in that transformation could think ahead and see that many things today considered laughable will soon be normal — and to start giving them a chance today.
At New Consensus, we’ve been arguing for years that it’s possible to accomplish a very rapid transition to a clean economy. When we released the Green New Deal, many climate advocates laughed (or yelled) at us for suggesting that it would be possible to rapidly transition the economy to net zero. We hoped that the recent embrace of industrial policy, and all the attention being given to America’s World War II economic mobilization (on which the Green New Deal was based) would allow some serious policy thinkers to consider that a rapid transition was not only needed (which they already accept) but also possible. Unfortunately, that still hasn’t happened yet on a large scale. We accept that the burden of proof is on us, and we’re working in the way we write the Mission for America to explain exactly how a fast transition could be possible, and to provide many historical and international examples of successful rapid transitions on the same scale as what we need.