The Rubicon of Climate Change

You might think that, by hitting some arbitrary target of max climate warming over the next decade or two, we'll be okay, as if that were the Rubicon. We've long crossed the Rubicon.

The evidence is there: rising ocean levels, collapsing glaciers, disappearing Arctic ice mass, stronger storms and droughts, ocean acidification, everything. The presence of these effects is the evidence that we've crossed the Rubicon.

Raise the temperature slightly and the ice cube melts slightly faster. Hold the temperature at the current level and the ice cube still melts but at the current pace.

If the Earth's natural systems can attenuate X units of carbon dioxide but we're already releasing X*1.2 units of carbon dioxide, even if we stopped the increase of carbon dioxide, we're still left with an accumulation of excess carbon dioxide.

What we're engaged in, is wishful thinking.

The Paris Accord may have been the world's best effort to date, but it is what politicians do to make themselves feel better about a problem so enormous, that the only palatable political solution is to sell incremental change as heroic action. That scientists offered an arbitrary target of max global warming, is akin to President Obama cutting down the size of his own stimulus package to make it agreeable for politicians to vote for.

We're still moving forward with the worst of the climate change effects, but we're putting it off into some further distant future, partly on the belief that we'll be able to build the technologies to further attenuate or actively reverse climate change. And I agree that we should be able to discover and build such technologies, but the costs will be higher than if we made those investments today, and we'll still feel the effects of climate change.

If you asked the soul of the dead frog whose body was boiled slowly what his Rubicon was, he would gladly tell you that it was the moment someone turned the stove on.