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Op-Ed: We Really Do Need To Worry About Climate Change - And Act

By: Lehigh University's Dept. Of Earth And Environmental Sciences Staff

[Note: The following op-ed appeared in the March 3 Allentown Morning Call.]

Climate has been in the news, thanks to the release of several concerning reports, plus reactions to the proposed Green New Deal.

Our Lehigh colleague in Economics, Tony O’Brien, recently published an opinion piece in these pages (Feb. 17) in which he claimed that climate-change impacts won’t be very bad, so there’s no need to go all-in on the Green New Deal, and that a nonideological view suggests a carbon tax is the far better approach.

We’d actually agree that a carbon tax would be one important part of an effective climate policy, but what motivates us to write is concern over widespread misunderstandings of the earth system and how it pertains to people and society, misunderstandings that happen to be well illustrated in O’Brien’s column.

First, it’s our judgment that there’s plenty to be really worried about, as reported in the fourth National Climate Assessment and related analyses. We’re not talking “hysteria,” just deep concern for our grandchildren and then theirs.

Solid science shows that by the end of the century the direct impacts on the economy could easily exceed several trillions of dollars per year.

Although not economists, we think it’s naive to depend on uninterrupted growth, future wealth and projections from the past in a nation that faces the costs of entitlements and infrastructure replacement, with energy costs unlikely to be nearly as cheap as those that enabled post-World War II prosperity.

The stark reality is that despite all the talk, global-emissions trends have closely followed the highest “business as usual” pathways. There’s been no sign of an invisible hand steering us to another course.

Our next concern is that economic and impact projections often err on the cautious side, either to avoid sounding alarmist or to stick to sectors that it’s easier to hang numbers on (such as Figure 29.2 of the NCA).

Such projections ignore anything like full valuation of fundamental ecosystem and natural-resources services, especially when those services are as hard to put a dollar on as they are essential, and they omit consideration of the human and economic costs of human hardships and migrations driven by climate change.

Beyond that, there are elements of the earth system and the natural world that are beyond valuation, either because of their fundamental nature or their spiritual significance, and these are omitted from impact projections.

Another problem in trying to cope with climate change is our human tendency towards overly simple short-term thinking. Too often debate about climate impacts focuses on brief extrapolations from past to future.

While OK in the short term, this ignores one of the great recent advances in physics, the understanding that systems with feedbacks can exhibit very complex and unexpected behavior that includes tipping points.

With respect to climate, we might hope for the best, but if we’re wise we’d better prepare for the chance of some surprises, something natural ecosystems and financial ones both very much dislike, things like significant accelerations of sea-level rise, or changes in the behavior of clouds that would greatly enhance warming.

The bottom line is that human-induced climate change presents an unparalleled challenge to humanity. Why? Climate change shares a simple cause in the energy use that is essential for our civilization, but fossil fuels are used by a complex blend of peoples, cultures, governments and industries.

Climate change is slow by human standards, a slow-rolling catastrophe that transcends quarterly reports, election cycles, careers and even generations, and we humans are very poorly equipped to manage that.

Climate change is pervasive across the world, unlike problems that can be tackled at one spot, and it will be around for a very long time. Due to the large residence times of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, significant impacts will continue for centuries — the world will not end in 2090.

Finally, climate response will be complex due to the nonlinear feedbacks in earth-system components like the oceans, atmosphere and biosphere.

Is it time for panic? Not panic, but some bipartisan feeling of collective urgency would be nice. Across the world, the environmental changes we see rolling out are a shared responsibility connected to both past and present emissions.

Solutions are going to require compromise and all hands on deck, whether it’s in policy, technology or economics: No one will like everything that’s required.

On the positive side, leadership on the issue can result in major and sustainable economic gains in energy sources that will have to change anyway at some point.

We all purchase insurance for disasters we don’t expect to happen: why wouldn’t we act now and insure our children and grandchildren against serious harm to their only home?

In our view, the motivations to act could not be stronger, the rewards more clear and the damage related to inaction more dire. To the poor lobster in a pot, things might look pretty good at first. But we all know how that story ends.

This op-ed is the joint collaboration of 15 professors in Lehigh University’s Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences: Peter Zeitler, Frank Pazzaglia, Anne Meltzer, Dork Sahagian, David Anastasio, Gray Bebout, Robert Booth, Edward Evenson, Benjamin Felzer, Ken Kodama, Donald Morris, Steve Peters, Joan Ramage, Zicheng Yu and Jill McDermott.

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