In early November, stormy winds threw a brush fire into a hell that nearly seized the city of Paradise, California, and killed at least 86 people.
By the second morning I smelled the fire from a foot outside my door in Berkeley, about 130 miles from the flames. My eyes and throat poked within a week, even when I was inside.
Air quality maps warned that the soot-filled air that covered the Bay Area had reached “very unhealthy” levels. For days, almost everyone wore masks as they walked their dogs, rode the train and did the shopping. Most of those thin paper masks were of doubtful value. Stores ran out quickly with the good ones – the “N-95s” that block 95% of fine particles – and also sold from air purifiers.
People exchanged tips on where to find them and hurried to stores that reportedly had a new offering. Others packed in and drove away for hours looking for a safe place to wait. By the time my masks arrived by mail, I was in Ohio and had decided to postpone my Thanksgiving trip to escape the smoke.
Climate change does not ignite forest fires, but it intensifies the hot, dry summer conditions that have contributed to some of California’s deadliest and most destructive fires in recent years.
I have long understood that the dangers of global warming are real and increasing. I have seen his power first hand in the form of receding glaciers, dried lakes and Sierra tree trunks that are broken down by bark beetles.
However, this is the first time that I smelled and tasted it in my house.
It is clear that a sore throat and a flight change are trivial compared to the lives and homes lost in the campfire. But after I had lived under a haze of smoke for a week, it resonated at a deeper level that we’re really going to make this happen.
Thousands, if not millions of people will starve, drown, die to death or live a life of misery because we have failed to come together in the face of the ultimate tragedy of the commons. Many more will search for elemental survival goods and worry about the prospect of more fires, more fierce hurricanes and summer days of blistering heat.
There is no longer a solution for climate change. We live alone with it and do everything we can to limit the damage.
And when I saw an entire community near one of the richest regions in the world, which was almost destroyed, while retailers were unable to meet critical public needs in the aftermath, I got a bleak picture of our ability to handle the much larger ones. to face challenges.
Suffering
Some observers believe that once the world has endured enough climate disasters, we will finally come to our collective senses and give a boost at the last minute to address the problem. But for many that will be too late.
Carbon dioxide needs years to reach its full warming effect and lasts for millennia. We may have emitted enough to sail past a dangerous 1.5 ˚C warming. And with the speed we follow, it can take hundreds of years to switch to a global energy system that doesn’t pump out much more climate pollution – every tonne makes the problem worse.
President Barack Obama’s top scientific adviser, John Holdren, once said that our options for dealing with climate change are reducing emissions, adjusting (for example, building higher sea defenses or building city cooling centers) and suffering.
Because we totally fail in the first category, much more of the work will inevitably amount to the last two. By choosing not to tackle the cause, we have chosen to tackle the problem in the most expensive, short-sighted, destructive and cruel manner.
We could have revised the energy system. Instead, we need to renew almost every aspect of life: expand emergency aid, build more hospitals, strengthen our coastline, upgrade our building materials, redesign the way we grow and distribute food, and more.
And even if we pay the high price to do it all, we still have worse results than if we had tackled the core problem in the first place. We have decided to forever reduce our quality of life, our sense of security and our collective opportunities to live a happy and healthy life. And we have done it not only for ourselves, but also for our children and future generations.
Uneven and unfair
The devastation caused by climate change will manifest itself in different places in different places, in very unequal and unfair ways: severe drought and famine in much of Africa and Australia, shrinking water supplies for the billions that rely on the glaciers of the Tibetan Plateau, and the threat of forced displacement for at least tens of millions exposed to rising sea levels in South Asia.
In California, higher temperatures, falling snow and changing precipitation patterns mean that more people are already living under the threat of drought and fire.
I have smelled or seen four major fires in the last two years. In July a good friend and her pregnant sister rushed the Interstate 580, via the Altamont Pass, while flames raged on both sides. Another friend ran into paradise to evacuate her father on the morning the campfire tore through the city. Another sifted ash in the remains of houses a few days later, looking for bone fragments and other human remains as part of a local search and rescue team.
Global warming has already doubled the area scorched throughout the West over the past three decades, according to a previous study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. By the middle of the century, that footprint could swell again by a multiple of two to six, according to the recent US national climate assessment (see “Reducing emissions can prevent tens of thousands of heat deaths annually”).
Self-preservation
All this is not a defense to throw our hands in the air – it is an argument to redouble our efforts. Even if we don’t ‘resolve’ climate change, we have to work feverishly to control it, such as a chronic illness. We must learn to live with the symptoms and at the same time find ways to prevent them from getting worse.
Every extra gigaton of greenhouse gas that we bring into the atmosphere from this moment onwards only increases the economic costs, the destruction of ecosystems and human suffering.
So the question is: what is needed to finally achieve the government policy, accelerated innovation and collective will that is needed to force rapid change?
It is hoped that as climate change becomes increasingly unmistakable and its effects begin to feel real and immediate threats to our well-being, people will demand that our leaders and industries take aggressive action.
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Research has shown that experiencing higher temperatures and extreme weather conditions is correlated with a greater belief in or concern about climate change. And younger people, staring at a much grim future, are considerably more inclined to believe that climate change is real and action is required – even among millennial Republicans in the US.
overwhelmed
But when I saw the increase in the number of deaths from simultaneous infernos in California last month, I noticed that another possibility was just as likely: the destruction of climate change will overwhelm society in ways that make us less inclined to make the sacrifices that necessary for a safer future.
We are likely to face a shrinking economy, skyrocketing emergency aid costs and an astonishing price tag for adaptation measures such as sea defenses – all while still having to race for zero emissions as quickly as possible.
People can dig deep for certain adjustments that promise to immediately improve their security, but the observed return on investment in reducing emissions could shrink as extreme weather conditions become more frequent and costly. That is because, again, carbon dioxide is delayed and the problem only gets worse – does not disappear – once we have achieved zero emissions (unless we find out how we can also extract huge amounts of it from the atmosphere).
As more of our money, time and energy is absorbed by the immediate demands of overlapping tragedies, I fear that people will become less willing to invest increasingly limited resources in the long-term public interest.
In other words, a paradoxical impact of climate change is that it could be much more reluctant to tackle it.
Worse to come
When I started writing about climate change just over five years ago, the dangers seemed largely aloof and abstract. Without realizing it, I have assumed most of the time that we will somehow address the problem in a meaningful way. We have no choice. So sooner or later we will do the right thing.
But after two years of close reporting and writing about clean energy technologies here, it has slowly become clear to me that, well, maybe not. While we can absolutely accomplish much of the necessary transformation with existing or emerging technologies, the huge scope of the required revision and the deep-rooted interests can reach insurmountable levels of slowness.
So the campfire and its aftermath did not push me in one hand from optimism to pessimism. The more I have come to understand the real parameters of the problem, the more I am tilted to the harrowing side of the spectrum.
But the surreal scene of highly paid workers walking through the dark yellow skies of downtown San Francisco, masks unintentionally coordinated in color with their earplugs in the capital of techno-utopism, has certainly expanded my frame of the possible – and felt like a taste of things coming.
