Democrats May Believe Climate Change Is Real. They Don’t Act Like It.
This week, scientists reported that the collapse of a critical Atlantic current system is more likely than many had feared. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, sends warm water from the Southern Ocean near Antarctica to the Arctic Sea, then returns the cooled water. It is responsible for influencing the weather conditions around which much of society is structured, such as the tropical precipitation belt and the relatively mild winters of Northern Europe. The AMOC was already thought to be weakening due to warming oceans, increased precipitation, and melting sea ice. Yet even though projections of a deeper slowdown vary widely, new research, incorporating real-world observations, suggests that it will slow by about 42 to 58 percent by 2100. By the middle of this century, the AMOC slowdown could pass a point of no return, where its collapse becomes virtually inevitable.
It is difficult to overstate the seriousness of this discovery. “This is an important and very worrying result,” said Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. The guardian. “This shows that the ‘pessimistic’ models, which show a strong weakening of the AMOC by 2100, are unfortunately the most realistic.”
These pessimistic models could have disastrous consequences: brutal and freezing winters in Northern Europe; disrupted growing seasons in South America; drought across the Sahel; and rapid sea level rise and stronger hurricanes along the United States Atlantic coast. A shutdown could further decimate the ocean’s ability to absorb carbon dioxide, leading to additional pollution. 0.2 degrees Celsius (0.36 degrees Fahrenheit) of global warming.
There is still debate within the scientific community about the magnitude and speed of the AMOC slowdown and what exactly that will mean, but the historical evidence is sobering. When AMOC inexplicably weakened By 30 percent in 2009 and 2010, the northeastern United States saw water levels rise at an unprecedented rate. A study published last year showed that 50 percent Doubling of flood risk since 2005 can be attributed to slowing AMOC to this day. Last time the current collapsed— about 12,800 years ago — Europe may have experienced Arctic-like conditions, with the average temperature dropping nearly 108 degrees. Fahrenheit in a few decades.
The new study comes as climate change has largely disappeared from political debates in much of the West. In response to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz for more than a month, liberal and right-wing governments have doubled down on investments in coal, oil and gas in the name of energy security. The mood in the United States might best be described as climate nihilism: climate-denying Republicans are destroying climate rules and doing everything in their power to punish renewable energy and increase fossil fuel production; Democrats who stood up in good faith for their fight against climate change just a few years ago are quietly rolling back laws and rhetoric on reducing emissions.
It’s easier, psychologically, to imagine that everyone shouting about climate change a few years ago were blue-haired radicals, NGO nutjobs, and politicians so eager to capture the votes and support of these groups that they foolishly took catastrophically unpopular positions on the issue. It’s also easier to debate the right way to talk politically about the climate crisis than to address the actual problem. Perhaps one of the main reasons climate change has disappeared from the national conversation is because it is an extremely upsetting thing to think about.
Liberals’ coded rhetoric about “solving” climate change — almost always tied to a handful of exciting green technologies — can seem like a more well-intentioned form of denial in its own right. There is no solution to climate change. This is already happening, and it will continue to get worse even if the world magically ended all fossil fuel burning tomorrow. A world-historic proliferation of solar, geothermal, wind, and nuclear power alone will not eliminate the burning of fossil fuels, much less create viable fossil-free alternatives for the cornerstones of modernity like concrete, steel, and nitrogen-based fertilizers. Nor will a thriving green technology sector succeed in peacefully relocating the millions of people living in places that are becoming uninhabitable.
To adequately plan for a future inevitably marked by climate change – in terms of mitigation, adaptation and loss – the world’s governments should unite behind a warlike mobilization that would make even the boldest Soviet planners blush. However, in a war, at least by conventional standards, one side can usually be said to have won once the war is over. In contrast, victory in a war on climate change would involve something like an ongoing battle, where the main goal would be to limit the number of losers to (optimistically) tens of millions rather than billions. The result would be a world fundamentally different from ours. Given the amount of greenhouse gases already being released into the atmosphere, a huge transformation in the way people live today is going to happen – and is happening – one way or another. The question is not whether we can preserve the world as it is and stop climate change, but whether we can plan these changes to be as destructive as possible.
It’s not exactly a winning message. Besides, talking about the collapse of AMOC will not win over influential voters in the United States either. But the alternatives to facing reality are lying about what’s happening or pretending it’s not happening. Those of us who aren’t running for office, at least, don’t need to be Holocaust deniers.
