[Act-ma_discuss] Adam Sacks: Climate Is About Far More Than Carbon Dioxide

[Amy Hendrickson]

Climate Is About Far More Than Carbon Dioxide


PublishedMay 21, 2021By Adam Sacks
<https://bio4climate.org/author/adam-admin/> 

https://bio4climate.org/2021/05/21/climate-is-about-far-more
-than-carbon-dioxide/

 

Adam Sacks is founder of the fine local group, Biodiversity
for a Liveable Climate,

https://bio4climate.org

 

 

 

 

“We have to do everything we know how to do to address
climate change.”
 
<https://www.climatecentral.org/news/climate-economists-ster
n-review-20827> Sir Nicholas Stern

But what is “everything we know how to do”?  What does
“everything” mean?  Who are “we”?

Until very recently “everything” meant reducing emissions
and pulling excess carbon out of the atmosphere.  That has
slowly begun to change, but our cherished , tenacious,
fallacious assumption has been that global warming revolves
around one isolated variable: carbon.

“We” has meant the climate research of the past two hundred
years, under the guidance and inspiration of physical
scientists.  They have done superb work, for which we owe
deep gratitude.  I would, however, point out two serious
considerations, at the heart of Biodiversity for a Livable
Climate’s mission:

Over the past thirty years, since Jim Hansen’s iconic 1988
warnings to Congress, our greenhouse gas dilemma has only
grown worse.  Dramatically worse.
In that worldview, biology barely exists.

Focusing on carbon makes our campaigns relatively simple but
does not take into account the complexity of the Earth
system. The Earth is the planet of biology, crafted in the
crucible of four billion years of evolution, plate tectonics
and vagaries of the sun, among many other things.  While the
likes of errant asteroids can cause massive disturbances, in
the long intervals between cosmic catastrophes biology is
firmly in charge of most of what happens on Planet Earth.

Climate is thus a biological phenomenon and where the
fundamental solutions lie.  Biology represents the most
complex set of relationships on this planet, and likely in
the entire universe.  It even appears to defy the implacable
2nd Law of Thermodynamics, the Entropy Law, which describes
the irresistible passage of all matter and energy into
disorder and nothingness (biology doesn’t really deny the
2nd Law, but it took more than a century to figure that
out).

Yet biology, as a driver of climate (as opposed to a victim
of hurricanes, insects, wildfires, etc.), is the scientific
orphan of climate research. As a result any serious inquiry
into the impacts of biology in mainstream science are
limited and recent.  Unfortunately, having been ignored or
summarily dismissed over two hundred years, biological
inquiries have also been deeply biased (i.e., bullied) by
two hundred years of research framing climate as a physical
science problem.

I say this because we have abundant examples of ecosystem
restoration leading to cooler temperatures, return of
biodiversity, rehydration of degraded and desertified lands,
etc. despite elevated GHGs.  Of course GHGs are
heat-trapping gases and a serious problem, but they are far
from the only factor and may even be a less important factor
than biodiversity.  Might GHGs eventually overwhelm other
factors?  Yes, they might, but that does not yet seem to be
the case.

As for Sir Nicholas’s entreaty, I agree, but the catch is
“everything we know how to do.”  Do we actually know how to
do all the things we think we know how to do?  Despite
growing enthusiasm over atmospheric carbon dioxide removal
(CDR) through high-tech geo-engineering, the only CDR we
truly “know how to do” is photosynthesis, turning carbon
dioxide and water into sugars, the basis of life on Earth. 

The technological CDR and its unintended consequences are
currently speculative and possibly quite dangerous, not to
mention  expensive and yet to be demonstrated at scale.
Clearly there are people who are passionate about creating
it and funding it, and I wish them well.  In the meanwhile I
hope that we will proceed with bringing billions of acres of
dead landscapes back to life.

Finally, one persistent myth is the assumption that we have
until 2050 and beyond to get this right, or that 1.5 °C is a
safe target.  Yet all hell is breaking loose now, we’re on
an accelerating, exponential path to destruction – and
that’s at barely more than 1.0 °C.  With all the feedbacks
in play how can we dare to imagine that we can rein in the
temperature simply by decarbonizing?

Climate disruption is a function of the degraded state of
the living world – and restoring that, fortunately, is
precisely what “we know how to do.”

And we know how now.  It’s time to bring Nature home.

[NOTE: For the scientific basis of this work, please see
<https://bio4climate.org/compendium/> our Compendium.]

 

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