The Tragedy of the Tao

For a guest post to the meta-blog Daily Canuck, I whipped off a few words on the chasm between what's considered politically feasible when it comes to a national climate change strategy for Canada and what climatology suggests will be necessary. Along the way, I got sidetracked by the bigger question of what to do when the "moderate," "reasonable" or, to use a Taoist phrase, the "middle way" is no longer up to the task of addressing a serious threat.

It seems pretty darn obvious that by now, we have allowed ourselves to get in just such a situation. Here's the fundamental problem:

1. Even though most climatologists are loathe to jump up and down and scream it out loud, the general opinion seems to be that the global climate will flip into an alternative equilibrium, one that is much less hospitable to civilization as we know it, if the heat budget of the troposphere rises much more than another two or three degrees Celsius. This may sound like an exaggeration, but with each release of a new study on the potential for a rapid melt of the Greenland ice sheet, the sensitivity of the thermohaline conveyor belt to changes in salinity and heat forcing, and paleoclimatological records of past rapid changes in global climate regimes, this scenario can no longer be considered "highly unlikely." I think a fair representation of the state of the science is such that a +3 C threshold for setting off catastrophic climate change is at least an even bet. In any event, it presents a high enough probability of coming to pass to warrant action to forestall it.

2. Avoiding that increase in temperature will not be easy. But it is technologically possible, if we can keep the concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and the various other greenhouse gases below a level approximately twice that of pre-industrial levels -- 500 or 550 parts per million seems to be critical point. On this point there is widespread agreement.

3. To achieve such a target will require reducing anthropogenic emissions of those molecules by about 90 per cent by about 2030. Agreement on the precise numbers here is harder to find. Tim Flannery, for example, says 70 per cent will sufficient. But the consensus appears to be that the cuts called for in the Kyoto protocol are at least an order of magnitude to small.

4. No government anywhere on the planet has proposed a plan of action that comes even close to meeting that target.

Why is that? The simple -- and wrong -- answer is that doing what it will take to achieve the 90 per cent reduction so quickly would ruin the global economy. The more sophisticated -- and more accurate -- answer is that those in positions of power and wealth are not prepared to accept the shifts in power and wealth that making the changes required to meet the target reductions would necessarily entail. The "economy" will do just fine, but making the transition from the current, centralized industrial economy to the post-carbon, decentralized economy will require enormous political will.

But that only explains the attitude of the people in charge. What of the rest of us? What of the journalists and the scientists they cover? Even those who spend their days immersed in these numbers seem reluctant to publicly acknowledge the scope of the challenge facing us.

The explanation I've come up with is that people are genetically and culturally programmed to accept the Taoist approach: prefer the moderate, middle of the road approach to that of either extreme. No one who values the respect of their family, friends and peers wants to be seen as an extremist. That includes the scientists who understand how bad things really are and the journalists who cover those scientists. We all want to appear "reasonable" in the eyes of our funding agencies and editors.

I submit that it is time to redefine "reasonable" to include drastic and radical change to the way electricity and transportation fuel are produced. If I am correct, the question then becomes, how do we go about building support for radical action?

First, we need the vocal support of science. We need more climatologists willing to call a spade a spade and dare to be labeled -- for a while -- an alarmist. And not just pension-secured guys like James Lovelock, either. I like the tenor of Roger Pielke Jr, who rails over at Prometheus against anyone who suggests the Kyoto protocol is anything more than a rhetorical device that merely introduces the idea of change.

I like Stephen Schneider and Jim Hansen, who have put their academic careers on the line time and time again to push the envelope of "reasonable" visions of where we're headed. (Yes, Pielke isn't a big fan of the Schneider-Hansen line of thinking, but that's just details; philosophically they share a disdain for timidity.)

And while we cultivate some courage, may I suggest a healthy dose of what I'll call strategic hypocrisy? By this I mean privately supporting those who are much more extreme than even you would like to be in an effort to move the "reasonable" center closer to that new radical area. For example, the Sierra Club always publicly pooh-poohs the vandalism of Earth First! while secretly thanking them for making "respectable" environmentalism appear more moderate by comparison.

Applying this now to the starting point of this line of thought: Canada's Conservative government last week introduced a climate change strategy that would see emissions "intensity" decline through 2020, and absolute volumes addressed only after that. The goal is a halving of emissions by 2050.

I suggest that the appropriate response is not to argue, as so many critics are doing, that the plan will not meet its goals. Of course they won't meet their goals. Of course intensity reductions will only allow for emissions to grow along with the economy. So what? That's just the "reasonable" approach. The real problem is the goals are far too modest. Every climatologist who knows better should be publicly and privately saying as much.

Scientists don't have to get politically active. They just have to be willing to contribute, forcefully, to the grand public debate and stop being afraid of no longer being considered a moderate. I know it's easy to say, and that mortgages make courage harder to find. But we're talking about the fate of civilization here.

How that's for extremist?