Given climate change catastrophe, build monuments?

I made an <earlier post on climate change>. It centered on an essay by Jonathan Franzen. The main message was that climate change is already here, and we need to think about how to live with it as best we can rather than pretending that if we all band together we can keep it from happening.

Not long after, I received the <latest issue>  of MIT's "Technology Review", with the cover title "Welcome to Climate Change". A mainstream publication was taking the same view Franzen had.

Some of the articles looked at details rather than the big picture, such as a push in areas of Australia where wildfires are becoming increasingly common to build fireproof houses (mostly underground).

We learn that while India is investing in solar power, it's still going to use more and more coal. Nuclear power, one possible source of energy without a carbon cost, is on the wane in Korea and China.

But the most interesting, big-picture article was by Roy Scranton, titled "Learning to live in an apocalypse". He notes that all previous crises we have faced or imagined begin with an event -- pandemic, earthquake, meteor strike, nuclear war -- and then they end. But there is no event marking the beginning of the climate crisis. It's already here and getting worse. There's also no end in sight. This is not a crisis you get over and resolve and recover from. It goes on for hundreds of years at least. The best guess is a 12-degree-Celsius rise in temperature in less than 100 years. Scranton suggests it's entirely possible that this is inconsistent with large numbers of human beings surviving. I'm afraid that sounds entirely plausible. Yet my intuition is there will be at the very least little corners of the earth that will still be habitable. A thousand-fold decrease in the population would still leave 7 million people, enough to be the seed of a new more vibrant civilization in hundreds of years as the climate improves or we find ways to adapt. Perhaps that will come across as emphasizing that the glass is 1% full instead of 99% empty, but human extinction feels far more serious than an enormous population decline followed by a resurgence.

So, if you can get your mind around the reality of climate change, how should you think about the future?

Scranton writes, "Our apocalypse is happening day by day, and our greatest challenge is learning to live with this truth while remaining committed to some as-yet-unimaginable form of future human flourishing -- to live with radical hope." Even if it came to look like there was a 90% chance we would go extinct, that 10% chance of a future flourishing should be enough to motivate us to go on.

And to emphasize the continuing great uncertainty, in this same Tech Review issue a real climate scientist, Tapio Schneider, writes, "The single biggest contributor [to uncertainty in climate predictions] is uncertainty about clouds, and specifically about low clouds in the tropics. Low clouds over tropical oceans reflect sunlight because they are white, and this cools the earth. We don't know if we'll get more or fewer of them as it warms."

Then we can ask what political actions we can take. In my previous post, I relayed Franzen's belief that if climate change is already here, it's much harder to motivate reducing carbon emissions. When you could say, "If we all pull together we can keep the temperature rise below 2 degrees and avoid catastrophe", that had a certain appeal. If you say, "If we all pull together, we can take one degree off the expected rise in temperature, though we don't know if that means 6 degrees instead of 7 or 10 degrees instead of 11, but it will probably help make things not quite so bad as they would otherwise be." The old message was not motivating any sort of major change, and it seems likely the new one will motivate far less. It's great to limit carbon emissions when opportunities arise, but it's time to give up on that as a central political strategy.

I hope scientists think hard about novel approaches to head off the worst calamities or minimize their destructive effects. Having abandoned the push to reduce carbon emissions, climate activists' new focus should be on massive funding for research and pilot projects of mitigation. Tech Review describes scientists working on genetically engineering new strains of food crops that can thrive in hotter and more extreme conditions -- the mitigation potential is obvious.

As sea levels rise, there will be enormous political pressure to find a way to save coastal cities. We should oppose large expenditures to protect against a 5-foot rise in sea levels if we can look just a little further into the future and see a 20-foot rise. We should oppose shortsighted, short-term solutions.

But the fundamental problem is that it looks like our civilization is in for a major decline no matter what we do, when taking account of the enormity of the problem and the political realities. Mitigation is an attempt to slow our decline, but it seems likely that it cannot prevent a decline that could better be termed a collapse.

If we take this view seriously, it suggests a major change of perspective -- perhaps a shocking change.

I suggest we look back to the Roman empire -- more than a thousand years ago. Today we figure the empire was going to fall no matter what they did. But when ordinary people think of the Romans, we don't condemn them for not doing everything in their power to keep the empire from falling, and we don't condemn them for extreme income equality and the many practices we now consider barbaric. We get joy and inspiration thinking about their luxuries and achievements at the height of their power.

If the future turns out to be as bleak as it appears, posterity may view us all as living in a golden age, the pinnacle of human achievement and comfort that will be followed by a thousand years of hard times. This suggests two different things we might do.

First, the people a thousand years from now will be far more interested in how far we expand the horizon of progress than what we did (and mostly did not do) to stave off catastrophe, so let's keep on pushing those limits, just as we have been. Let's keep extending the human lifespan and curing rare diseases. For us liberals, goals include reducing income inequality and working to improve the lot of oppressed minorities. Let's keep those scientific discoveries coming so we know more and more about the nature of the universe.

At a personal level, we can choose to enjoy what our forebears created for us, even if we can see that it will likely end before long. There's no need to stay at home, eating locally grown potatoes, freezing in winter and baking in summer -- though few of us do that anyway.  Let's go right on using air conditioning, driving wherever and whenever we want, eating produce flown in from far away, and flying on jets to vacation or visit distant friends. Heck, we can do more of it.

This doesn't require much effort, since that is what ordinary people are doing right now. But it suggests that climate activists could relax and feel less guilty about mostly living a life of ease and going right on as if nothing is going to change.

The second thing we might do would be to put more effort today into pushing the limits of what we can accomplish. Build a pyramid to make Cheops look like an anthill. I've mostly thought the idea of a manned mission to Mars was a ridiculously expensive boondoggle. But if we think of our legacy as the far limits of human achievement in this golden age, why not?

A <Star Trek episode> explores what a civilization does when it realizes all life on its planet is going to end. They created a probe to go off into the stars and transmit to someone (Captain Pickard, naturally) the experience of one lifetime on their planet -- for some remnant of their civilization to survive. That technology is pure science fiction, but if our audience is humans on Earth emerging from primitive circumstances, it is more feasible: Let's engrave a summary of human knowledge and history in rock.

In search of analogies, a strong sports team vying for a championship may trade away future prospects for proven stars who can help them win right now. Someone in hospice can eat whatever they want, or use whatever addictive drugs they want, knowing their own time is almost finished. The future rests not with them but with their children.

It's premature to fully adopt this perspective. We can still all hope for more low clouds in the tropics rather than fewer. But it's time to realize that developments of the next 20 years might make this an approach to seriously consider. In 40 years it might clearly be the right thing to do. It's time to start thinking about it now.

The vast majority of people today will not accept the idea of coming catastrophe, perhaps by consciously denying it or more often by just figuring that the world won't change much and there are always doomsayers. Perhaps their attitudes will change if we do have to abandon coastal cities and significant portions of the world population start dying. Perhaps they will then be receptive to this plan of expensive space missions and monumental achievements if circumstances become dire enough.

Yet even an ordinary billionaire could finance inscriptions in rock.