Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
the vast majority of whom will die early deaths, a problem that can be solved only by using more fossil
fuels. Not only are we ignoring the big picture by making the fight against climate danger the fixation of
our culture, we are “fighting” climate change by opposing the weapon that has made it dozens of times
less dangerous.
The popular climate discussion has the issue backward. It looks at man as a destructive force for climate
livability, one who makes the climate dangerous because we use fossil fuels.
In fact, the truth is the exact opposite; we don't take a safe climate and make it dangerous; we take a
dangerous climate and make it safe. High-energy civilization, not climate, is the driver of climate livab-
ility. No matter what, climate will always be naturally hazardous—and the key question will always be
whether we have the adaptability to handle it or, better yet, master it.
OUR NATURALLY HAZARDOUS CLIMATE
There is a widespread idea among climate commentators, including climate scientists, that the global cli-
mate system, absent human CO
2
emissions, is safe.
There is an unsophisticated and a sophisticated version of this argument.
Unsophisticated: John Kerry, when speaking to Indonesia, a nation that has dramatically increased its
well-being in recent years through the burning of coal, tells them to stop burning coal: “But, ultimately,
every nation on Earth has a responsibility to do its part if we have any hope of leaving our future gen-
erations the safe and healthy planet that they deserve.”
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But that “safe and healthy” planet is incredibly
precarious for anyone outside high-energy civilization. Indonesia frequently gets hit by earthquakes and
tsunamis killing hundreds or thousands and would be much safer were it more industrialized, with sturdy
buildings, modern disaster relief, and the wealth and resources to rebuild quickly.
The sophisticated version of the idea that our climate is naturally safe or ideal says that because man
has flourished in the current climatological period, the 10,000-year post-Ice Age stretch known as the Ho-
locene, that is the only global climate we can live in and if there's a risk that fossil fuels will break the
“natural” temperature highs of that last 10,000 years, we need to stop using them. “Just like us,” says Bill
McKibben, “our crops are adapted to the Holocene, the 11,000-year period of climatic stability we're now
leaving . . . in the dust.”
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This argument does not reflect reality.
First of all, the Holocene is an abstraction; it is not a “climate” anyone lived in; it is a
summary of a
climate system that contains an incredible variety of climates that individuals lived in.
And in practice, we
can live in pretty much any of them if we are industrialized and pretty much none of them if we aren't.
The open secret of our relationship to climate is how good we are at living in different climates thanks to
technology.
I live in the United States, in Southern California, which is naturally a near desert where I would have
diedofdrought(ornotlivedhere)inpreviousgenerations.Butthankstoirrigation,air-conditioning,sturdy
homes,andothertechnological advances(especiallyhigh-energytransport,whichenablesmetotradewith
people far away for goods I could not create under the local circumstances), this is one of the most won-
derful places on Earth to live: I can enjoy warm, temperate, low-humidity weather without the downsides
of the desert.
