"CODE RED" FOR HOMO SAP

I can remember the first time I heard the words “global warming.” It was 1970. I had decided (or rather my wife had decided for me, given her interest in living with an “employable,” which I wasn’t at the time after being fired from early Rolling Stone and being pretty depressed as a result) to go back to college and finish the degree that had been disrupted by my active participation in that phenomenon known as “The Sixties.” Education was free (really!) in California then, and I decided to do a semester at San Francisco City College and knock off the last lower division required classes before transferring to San Francisco State. I had to take a science class and - having not yet resolved my relationship with my Original Creative Genius In His Field scientist father - I was still terrible at math and science. So I took this brand new class called “Ecology.” There wasn’t any math or physics or chemistry (which I had mostly flunked in high school and damn near flunked the first time I went to college after the Navy). There was a whole lot of new information. It was the year after the 1969 Santa Barbara Oil Spill, one of the first Major Environmental Disasters. It was the year of the first “Earth Day.” I remember the professor was really good. He really communicated. And I came out of that class aware there were Real Problems facing us as a species. And even then, my political sense told me it was likely humans were going to flunk the test.

That summer, I went to my first science fiction fan convention (as someone who later became a member of the Science Fiction Writers of America for writing “The Terror Within,” I have had a love/hate relationship with those events). Larry Niven was one of the writers who showed up, and he ran a seminar in “How To Think About The Future (And Come Up With A Good Story)” which I attended. And what do you think he brought up as a future to think about? Global Warming. He conjured up a future where there were two species on the planet, and one could survive in a world that was warming - and therefore wanted to do things that promoted that - and the other would be destroyed if that happened.

The funny thing is, 50 years later it seems that is what happened. Here. Not some fictional place. Here, where we live. There really are two different species. Homo Sapiens and Homo Sap. And we are, each of us, simultaneously, both.

A good metaphor for us in movie terms is “The Return of the King,” the third movie in the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy. There’s the people of Mordor, servants of Sauron, who will thrive if they destroy the world as it exists; and there are the people of Middle Earth, who will die if that happens. And the only way to destroy Sauron is for a good person (Frodo) to take The Ring and throw it into the fiery pit of the volcano known as Mount Doom. And for most of the movie, it really seems Sauron is going to turn the whole world into Mordor.

Can Frodo (us) make it up the side of Mount Doom, through all the trials and tribulations, and at the last minute throw the ring into the pit?

David Chase (creator of “the Sopranos”) was once asked by an interviewer what the underlying theme of the show was. He answered, “Why is the world still a fucked up place, generation after generation?” Good question. Despite everything we do, despite all the battles we fight and the wars we think we won, 50 years later it’s all back again - that’s something I and a lot of people I know have thought since 2015, when Trump came down his golden escalator to lead the forces of Mordor to rise up and reverse every battle we thought we’d won 50 years earlier.

All we have to do is Do The Right Thing, and it’s so obvious what that is. But we can’t seem to do it. Right after I finally finished school,.I went to work in “professional politics” in San Francsco. In 1973, my then boss was - in addition to his position as an elected member of the San Francisco County Board of Supervisors - the chairman of the newly-created California Coastal Commission.

The first Big Environmental Issue was before the board: approving construction of the San Onofre nuclear powerplant in Orange County. It was such an obvious “Don’t Go There!” A nuclear power plant sited in one of the most heavily-populated places in California. I was at the time getting a Master of Public Administration degree in the new field of “Environmental Management” at night, and was right in the middle of studying that issue. To me, the Really Big Issue, the one that the other side could never answer successfully, was “What do you do with the garbage?” What do you do with nuclear waste that has to be kept absolutely separated from the environment for 36,000 years, the half-life of plutonium? That’s three times longer than ALL of recorded human history. Finding a safe site involves predicting 36,000 years of the future, done on the Geologic Time Scale, something that the more we study it, the more we know that we don’t know shit from shinola about it.

I talked with my boss about this. A lot. I gave him facts and figures and he “got it.” He understood what the issues were, and he would be the deciding vote on the Coastal Commission, with the power to kill this monster before it was born. It was the easiest point in the whole process to Do The Right Thing.

And then...

My boss was in the midst of planning a step up on the political ladder, a run for statewide office. There were a lot of good things one could do as State Controller, using powers of the office that had not been used previously, that could promote some real progressive results. A Good Guy in an office with powers to create Good Results. What’s not to like?

Unfortunately, the only way to get a good guy in that office is to win an election, and that means running a successful campaign.

And just before the coastal commission vote, my boss took a meeting with the President of the California Construction Trades Council, AFL-CIO. He told my boss there were going to be 35,000 jobs created by the construction of San Onofre. And if those jobs didn’t happen because of his vote, the labor movement would remember who killed “all them jobs” when it came time to recommend a candidate for all the good union members to vote for to be State Controller. And as anyone knows, San Onofre was built, and all the environmental problems described in the Environmental Impact Statement did occur. And my boss didn’t win the election despite the support of the state AFL-CIO. And now 40 years later it is decommissioned and they are trying to figure out Where To Put The Garbage. Oh, and there weren’t 35,000 jobs created, there never are in these kinds of projects, but organized labor (Charlie Brown) always buys the story organized capital (Lucy) gives them that this time there really will be “all them jobs.” And as a result, things like San Onofre continue to happen.

The point of this little story is that everyone involved did what they did because they were convinced they were Doing The Right Thing.

As has been said many times, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

I thought of all this while reading the news this morning.

I’ve been following the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) since the first one. They’ve always presented their dire news in a restrained, reasonable, rational way.

I didn’t see any of that in today’s report.

The Sixth Assessment Report states clearly that there’s no more “scientific debate” on the issue: It is now “unequivocal” that humans are warming the planet, and that’s triggering rapid changes in the atmosphere, oceans and polar regions, and increasing extreme weather around the world.

The primary conclusion is that the nations of Earth have delayed curbing their fossil-fuel emissions for so long that they can no longer stop global warming from intensifying over the next 30 years. Humans have already heated the planet by roughly 1.1 degrees Celsius, or 2 degrees Fahrenheit, since the 19th century, largely by burning coal, oil and gas for energy.

The consequences can be seen across the globe: Just in the past few months this summer, blistering heat waves have killed hundreds of people in the United States and Canada, floods have devastated Germany and China, and wildfires have raged out of control in Siberia, Turkey and Greece. California reels before the Dixie Fire, now the worst wildfire in the state’s history.

But that’s not the Big Important Point in the report.

This is: even if nations started sharply cutting emissions today, total global warming is likely to rise around 1.5 degrees Celsius within the next 20 years, a hotter future that is now essentially locked in.

What does that mean? At 1.5 degrees of warming, the dangers grow considerably. Nearly one billion people worldwide could experience more frequent life-threatening heat waves. Hundreds of millions more would struggle for water because of severe droughts. Many animal and plant species alive today will be gone. Coral reefs, which sustain fisheries for large swaths of the globe, will suffer more frequent mass die-offs.

This weekend, I saw mentioned the fact that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation is becoming less strong and will continue to weaken over the rest of this century. The AMOC is otherwise known as the Gulf Stream.

Go look at a globe: Europe rests at the same latitude as Hudson’s Bay, yet while Hudson’s Bay has been barely able to sustain human life due to its cold temperatures, Europe has long been habitable. That’s because of the Gulf Stream. Take away the Gulf Stream and you get Hudson’s Bay in London. With the warming coming from climate change, it won’t be the Hudson’s Bay we think of today at the end of the first century of the third millenium, but it won’t be a place as inviting for us as it is now.

This is from the New York Times report on the report:

“… humanity can still prevent the planet from getting even hotter. Doing so would require a coordinated effort among countries to stop adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by around 2050, which would entail a rapid shift away from fossil fuels starting immediately, as well as potentially removing vast amounts of carbon from the air. If that happened, global warming would likely halt and level off at around 1.5 degrees Celsius, the report concludes.

“But if nations fail in that effort, global average temperatures will keep rising — potentially passing 2 degrees, 3 degrees or even 4 degrees Celsius, compared with the preindustrial era. The report describes how every additional degree of warming brings far greater perils, such as ever more vicious floods and heat waves, worsening droughts and accelerating sea-level rise that could threaten the existence of some island nations. The hotter the planet gets, the greater the risks of crossing dangerous “tipping points,” like the irreversible collapse of the immense ice sheets in Greenland and West Antarctica.”

My good friend Josh Marshall, who runs Talking Points Memo and is the son of a scientist who understood what “global warming” and “climate change” would mean for humans early on, has written today about what his father taught him:

“...if you’re steeped in these dynamics of ecological systems and their resilience you know one basic fact. Life is incredibly resilient. Apex predators and top level consumers are not. And that’s what we are. The ultimate top level consumer, both bestriding and utterly dependent on the stability of the global ecosystem.

“Top level consumers are at the top of the pyramids often used to illustrate ecological systems. But it’s a bit more like a game of Jenga. The player at the top gets the top billing. They’re also totally dependent on the myriad bit players down the chain. Whales need plankton. Plankton doesn’t need whales. There’s a bit more interdependence than that. But that’s the basic dynamic. We are highly, highly dependent on the precise chemistry of the oceans, the vagaries of climate and microfauna that allow us to grow food at a scale that will feed anything remotely like the current global human population. We need microfauna and soil microorganisms. They don’t need us.

“Worried about life on earth? Don’t be. Life’s resilient and has a many hundreds of millions of years track record robust enough to handle and adapt to anything we throw at it. But the player at the top of the heap is the first to go.

“Now, humans do have one key ace in the hole. We have a brain that allows a different form of adaptability. Long before any modern technology, with the most archaic of tools, humans managed to colonize the entire planet save for Antartica – from the most baked, parched desert sands to the permanent frozen regions.

“They managed to keep operating even in the face of vast climatic changes, some of them quite abrupt. We can hope that the two to four decades will see us arrest the release of carbon into the atmosphere and then use our technological smarts to reverse the damage where possible and adapt to living in the altered environment. Let’s hope. We are but a thin film of life on the edges of a vast interplay of lifeforms, climate and geology that makes our existence possible. As a species we’re in real trouble.”

I hate to say this, but as an historian and as someone with direct experience of how human politics work, I have strong doubt that we’ll pull out of this one. Humans are the evolutionary experiment in a biological intelligence that could foresee the results of its actions and modify its behavior to change those outcomes. Looking at 12,000 years of recorded human history, I am sorry to say I think our experiment is a failure, at least as far as humans in large societies are concerned. We constantly Do The Wrong Thing while convincing ourselves we’re Doing The Right Thing. Just look at how we’re handling the coronavirus pandemic. It’s pretty clear that Delta has won.

If one thinks of the planet as a living organism (the “Gaia Theory”), and one plots human population growth since 1800 - when we first arrived at a human planetary population of 1 billion - our population growth looks like that of a cancer cell. Is the coronavirus Gaia’s T-cells, making a final attempt to kill off the cancer?

I would love to be proven wrong. But the last 50 years makes me think I am right. We may be “Homo Sapiens” on the individual level, but as a group, we’re “Homo Sap.”

And now it’s “Code Red” for Homo Sap.

(Read the NYT article on the IPCC report here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/09/climate/climate-change-report-ipcc-un.html?utm_source=pocket-newtab )

Comments are for paid subscribers. It’s a real bargain here on Substack: $7/month or $70/year (a $14 savings).