The end game

I know that I am a cautious optimist on the best of days, and General Malaise on most of the rest.  There isn't much that I can gather as evidence for me to become a sunny optimist.  The biggest of them all is the rapidly changing global climate, which is reflected in unfavorable local conditions.

Yes, be warned that there might not be a lot of hope and enthusiasm in this post.

A full week into October, and yet again we wake up to air quality conditions that are not what we want to see.

As the day warms up, odds are that the air quality conditions will worsen. 

Of course, people in, say, New Delhi or across the northern part of the Subcontinent, might be thrilled to experience such a good air quality, given the far worse conditions that they experience.  I am not looking for sympathy from them, nor am I thanking the stars that I am not experiencing anything worse.  We live on the same and only planet and, to borrow from Martin Luther King, Jr., "we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny."

A week into October, we have barely had any rain.  The daytime highs are above-average.  The forest fires that are more than an hour of a drive away from here have not been dampened by rains, nor have the storm systems materialized from the Pacific Ocean to push the smoke away from the valley.

This is one, and merely one, of the many new conditions in which we live.  People in other parts of the world describe other new conditions in their parts of the world.  Heatwaves around the world.  When it rains, it floods.  It might be water all around, but people have no water to drink.  It is difficult for me not to be General Malaise.

We are told that this is the "new normal."  To which any reasonable person can have only response: WTF!

Greta Thunberg is angry as hell, and rightfully so:

“This is the new normal” is a phrase we often hear when the rapid changes in our daily weather patterns – wildfires, hurricanes, heatwaves, floods, storms, droughts and so on – are being discussed. These weather events aren’t just increasing in frequency, they are becoming more and more extreme. The weather seems to be on steroids, and natural disasters increasingly appear less and less natural. But this is not the “new normal”. What we are seeing now is only the very beginning of a changing climate, caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases. Until now, Earth’s natural systems have been acting as a shock absorber, smoothing out the dramatic transformations that are taking place. But the planetary resilience that has been so vital to us will not last for ever, and the evidence seems to suggest more and more clearly that we are entering a new era of more dramatic change.

We have entered a new era.  A new epoch.  The Anthropocene.

Thunberg warns that we are approaching a precipice.  "I would strongly suggest that those of us who have not yet been greenwashed out of our senses stand our ground. Do not let them drag us another inch closer to the edge. Not one inch. Right here, right now, is where we draw the line."

What lies beyond the precipice?

We might not want to know.  But, merely closing our eyes does not help.  The precipice is there, and there has to be something beyond that.

A report that was published about two months ago says what it is all about right in the title: Climate Endgame: Exploring catastrophic climate change scenarios. 

It was not one of those publications in some third-rate academic journal in which academics from second-tier universities like my former employer might publish in order to demonstrate that they are capable of producing peer-reviewed research.  Nope.  This report was published in the PNAS: "The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), is an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans the biological, physical, and social sciences. The journal is global in scope and submission is open to all researchers worldwide."

So, what is the climate endgame?  What lies beyond the precipice?  Of course, the IPCC and others like Al Gore have been warning us about various scenarios.  The researchers "suggest a research agenda for catastrophic climate change that focuses on four key strands:

• Understanding extreme climate change dynamics and impacts in the long term 

• Exploring climate-triggered pathways to mass morbidity and mortality 

• Investigating social fragility: vulnerabilities, risk cascades, and risk responses 

• Synthesizing the research findings into “integrated catastrophe assessments”

What's the difference then between the endgame research agenda outlined here versus, say, the IPCC reports?  "Right now, I think we're being naive. We're not looking at the worst-case scenarios at all, really," says Luke Kemp, Ph.D., with Cambridge's Centre for the Study of Existential Risk."

We have been in a denial of sorts thinking that somehow the worst-case scenarios will be avoided.  What if we cannot?  What if we do not?  That is the very call for the endgame research.

We could enter such “endgames” at even modest levels of warming. Understanding extreme risks is important for robust decision-making, from preparation to consideration of emergency responses. This requires exploring not just higher temperature scenarios but also the potential for climate change impacts to contribute to systemic risk and other cascades. We suggest that it is time to seriously scrutinize the best way to expand our research horizons to cover this field. The proposed “Climate Endgame” research agenda provides one way to navigate this under-studied area. Facing a future of accelerating climate change while blind to worst-case scenarios is naive risk management at best and fatally foolish at worst.

When I wake up to bad air quality conditions on October 8th, I have no choice but to be General Malaise who believes that we are being naive if we think that we can avoid falling off the precipice.