Somewhere past the middle of Mr. Wallace-Wells’s alarming book are written the words “If you have made it this far, you are a brave reader.” I nodded involuntarily. After enduring page after page of horrific, unvarnished truths, I needed the reassurance that the author realised the effect he was having on me, and anyone with the fortitude to plough through this deceptively slim volume of doom.
It is natural to shrink away from the reality of climate change. It is tempting to look at the abundance of life around us and ignore the rapidly quickening, drip-drip-drip effect of the poison. The poison that we, and we alone, have unbottled since we first started burning fossil fuels.
Why, you must sometime have wondered, are we the only known planet that supports life? Well, it turns out that this is because the set of circumstances needed to support life are both fragile and fleeting. Consider this. Half of the carbon released from the burning of fossil fuels has been only in the past three decades. Thirty years’ worth of firing coal has been enough to set off a mass extinction and irreversible weather shifts. This means that in only a single generation, life on this planet has slipped into a state of terminal decline.
Terminal? What then of the aim of restricting further warming to 2 degrees, fetishised in the Paris climate accord, and preached to us ever since like a lesson in an Indian school, to be learned by rote? Even if we can actually arrest warming to around 2 degrees (we are nowhere close to getting there), heat waves in India will increase by 32 times, last five times as long, and expose 93 times as many people. At 4 degrees, where we are currently headed by the end of this century, ours will be an unliveable country. Keep in mind, the last time the earth was 4 degrees warmer, global sea levels were 260 feet higher.
As chilling are the irreversible death spirals, referred to as ‘feedback loops.’ Here’s one – when the planet warms, Arctic ice melts, and sunlight that was earlier being reflected back by the ice has to be absorbed by the planet, which means more warming, and more melting, and so on. Warming also means that the seas lose some of their ability to absorb carbon, which means even more warming. Here’s one more – a warmer planet leads to more forest fires, which means lesser trees, which leads to lesser carbon being absorbed, which means more carbon in the air, and…you get the point. These forces have already been unleashed, and no one knows if we can stop them now, no matter what we do.
The rot affects everything. As carbon levels rise, we find ourselves in the middle of “The Great Nutrient Collapse”. Plants are making more sugars and less nutrients – like protein, calcium, iron, and vitamin C. Since 1950, the ability of plants to create these has declined by one-third. Everything, Wallace-Wells remarks, is becoming more like junk food. The effect on the microbial activity that gives us soil has been equally devastating. Yields have collapsed, and the world’s natural wheat belt is moving north by 160 miles a decade. Soil erosion in India is thirty to forty times faster than the natural replenishment rate.
For those who prefer to measure everything in GDP growth, every degree of warming reduces growth by 1%. If you are wondering why the massive improvements in technology in the last decade have produced only modest growth, you have your answer. Famine, drought, disease and floods – symptoms of our current climate crisis – more than negate the effects of anything the genius of man can conjure.
For years, our sustained attack on the organisms that we share the world with was framed like a fratricide. How could we destroy the habitats of our fellow beings for our own greed? The environmentalists were wrong. If the post mortem of our coming and visible end were to be drawn up, it will say ‘death by suicide’.
Is there a way out? Even with the precipitous fall in the cost per unit of renewable energy, over the last 25 years, the proportion of global energy use from renewables has not grown at all. What we need then is the collective gumption to bear the pain of shutting down the ignition of fossil fuels. By how much? By 10% a year, if we want to keep warming at 2 degrees. Leave alone declining by such a huge number, global emissions are increasing. (The current level is 32 gigatons of emissions a year.)
It will take a miracle. I don’t believe in miracles.
