Was the Climate Singularity Now?

This is a now quaint sounding thing I wrote six years ago, originally titled 'Is the Climate Singularity Now'. Ask yourself if the calamities described in the 2nd paragraph have abated or expanded unabated? I refuse to give into pessimism about our ability as a species to solve a problem of our own creation, but more and more lately that's seeming like an act of misguided faith.

Singular events are often the driving force for radical change that impact civilization. The murder of Archduke Ferdinand helped initiate the First World War, the bombing of Pearl Harbor  brought the United States into the Second World War, the September 11th attacks on New York and Washington DC have largely shaped geopolitics for nearly two decades. Of course, each of these events was the consequence of many previous actions that set the stage for a single dramatic act identified as the focal point, after which everything changed.

The issue before us now is global warming and associated planetary changes in climate. From nearly all Earth Scientists to actuarial projections of major insurance companies there is broad and general consensus that global warming constitutes a major threat to civilization. Since 2000,  in the United States alone we’ve nearly lost three major cities, New Orleans, San Juan, and Houston to hurricanes, watched Gatlinburg Tennessee burn (due to intense drought in one of wettest parts of the US), seen unprecedented wildfires and fire-related deaths in California, and now experience routine ocean flooding in low-lying, but previously rarely flooded areas of the East Coast. While these and many other calamities have been linked, some would say without proof, to global warming, none of them has qualified as a singularity that has galvanized action. Instead like women’s health issues and gun control, to name but two, global warming is cynically viewed as a convenient political football that can help rile up the base, but that has no real consequences to capitalism, or a market driven economy, or for that matter, civilization. For that you need a singularity.

As a problem, climate change and global warming is nefarious in this way. Despite being underlain by some pretty simple physics, as a whole the process hides itself in statistical analyses that rely on the multiple lines of reasoning contingent to any global problem, as well as complicated computer models to reveal. At the same time, we are smacked in the face nearly every day with indirect effects of warming events like wind, rain, drought, fire, heat, and ironically sometimes cold and snow. So if you want to be skeptical, it’s easy to weasel around. This is the reason we lack a single clearly identified galvanizing event. The truth is, there probably won’t be, since the clearest signals of global warming, like the increase in global surface temperature, sea-level rise, or ocean acidification happen, at decadal not daily timescales.   

But what if the singularity is now. Not only now, but over the last half century?

Why aren't we doing anything serious about it? Initiating carbon taxes, at a minimum like those proposed by x (= a democrat) and y (= a republican). Why aren’t we recalibrating and expanding research and technology efforts over the next five years in the US, so that at a minimum of 2.5% of GDP goes to better understanding the global warming problem, monitoring it, and especially developing solutions. As a side note, 2.5% is the percentage of United States GDP that went to the Apollo moon landings in the 1960s. The current combined Earth Science budgets of the National Science Foundation, NASA, and NOAA are a fraction of a fraction of percent of current GDP. Why isn’t there momentum towards making this apply to planetary GDP? Why aren’t we doing more to enable markets to develop solutions that will more rapidly develop non-carbon based energy sources. Why aren’t we starting the background research and testing around planetary geoengineering that may be required as a last ditch effort to mitigate the worst effects of warming, those that could literally threaten civilization. It’s currently unknown if geoengineering efforts can be successful at all, and if they are undertaken hastily, it is reasonably likely they will be a disaster. Why isn’t there a major initiative with a multi-billionaires name attached to it (as there are several for human health initiatives (for God’s sake, there’s already >8,000,000,000 humans!)) that is solely focused on mitigation of global warming? Why? Why? Why?

I’m a big believer that as a civilization humanity is more intelligent than it used to be. We now need to ask an imperative question, do we have the collective intelligence to see a singularity not in an event of the moment, but in an unfolding of events, focus our thinking, and take action to make a radical change that removes the threat of global warming, and allows civilization to continue to flourish.