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Optimism and Hope in a Hotter Time

We like optimistic people. They are fun, often funny, and very often capable of doing amazing things otherwise thought to be impossible. Were I stranded on a life raft in the middle of the ocean and had a choice of a companion between an optimist and pessimist, I’d want an optimist, providing he did not have a liking for human flesh. Optimism, however, is often rather like Yankee fans believing that the team can win the game when it’s the bottom of the ninth; they’re up by a run, have two outs, a two strike count against a .200 hitter, and Mariano Rivera in his prime is on the mound. They are optimistic for good reason. Red Sox fans, on the other hand, believe in salvation by small percentages and hope for a hit to get the runner home from second base and tie the game. Optimism is the recognition that the odds are in your favor; hope is the faith that things will work out whatever the odds. Hope is a verb with its sleeves rolled up. Hopeful people are actively engaged in defying or changing the odds. Optimism leans back, puts its feet up, and wears a confident look knowing that the deck is stacked. I know of no good reason for anyone to be optimistic about the human future, but I know a lot of reasons to be hopeful. How can one be optimistic, for example, about global warming? First, it isn’t a “warming,” but rather a total destabilization of the planet brought on by the behavior of one species: us. Whoever called this “warming” must have worked for the advertising industry or the northern Siberian Bureau of Economic Development. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—the thousand-plus scientists who study climate and whose livelihoods depend on authenticity, replicability, data, facts, and logic—put it differently. A hotter world means rising odds of more heat waves and droughts; more and larger storms; bigger hurricanes; forest dieback; changing ecosystems; more tropical diseases in formerly temperate areas; rising ocean levels (faster than once thought); losing many things nature once did for us; more and nastier pests; food shortages due to drought, heat, and more and nastier pests; more human deaths from climatedriven weather events; more refugees fleeing floods, rising seas, drought, and expanding deserts; international conflicts over energy, food, and water; and if we do not act quickly and wisely, runaway climate change resulting in some new stable state, possibly without humans. Some of these changes are inevitable given the volume of heattrapping gases we have already put into the atmosphere. There is a lag of several decades between the emission of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases and the weather headlines, and still another lag until we experience their full economic and political effects. The sum total of the opinions of climate experts is that the planet has already warmed 0.8 ◦C; it will warm another ∼0.6 ◦C; it is too late to avoid trauma but probably not too late to avoid global catastrophe, which includes the possibility of runaway climate change; there are no easy answers or magical solutions; it is truly a global emergency. Whether we can escape global catastrophe is anyone’s guess, because the level of heat-trapping gases is higher than it has been in the past 650,000 years and quite likely for a great deal longer. We are playing a global version of Russian roulette, and no one knows for certain what the safe thresholds of various heat-trapping gases might be. Scientific certainty about the pace of climate change over the past three decades has a brief shelf-life, but the pattern is clear. As scientists learn more, what they are finding is that the situation is worse than they previously thought. Ocean acidification went from being a problem a century or two hence to being a crisis in a matter of decades. Melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets went from being possible hundreds of years hence to a matter of decades and a century or two. The threshold of perceived safety went down from perhaps 560 ppm CO2 to perhaps 450 ppm CO2, and so forth. Optimism in these circumstances is like whistling while walking past the graveyard at midnight. There is no good case to be made for it but the sound of whistling sure beats the sound of rustling in the bushes beside the fence. But whistling does not change the probabilities one iota or much influence any lurking goblins.