Suigenocide II: Runaway Global Warming

An extinction-level general nuclear war is more likely now than at any time since the Cuban Mssile Crisis of 1962. Next to that, runaway global warming is less certain a suigenocidal event.

Nevertheless, scientists have identified several real, physical mechanisms of positive feedback by which global warming self-accelerates, even without our pumping additional greenhouses gases into the atmosphere—which we continue to do, willy nilly. In rough order of importance, these mechanisms are: (1) emission of methane from melting permafrost and dissociating deep-sea methane hydrates, (2) the loss of a huge global heat sink as glaciers and polar icecaps melt, and (3) the decrease of the Earth’s reflectivity (albedo) as surface ice melts in our glaciers and at the poles.

We know that all these phenomena are real, ongoing and now mostly independent of our burning fossil fuels. We also know that their interaction in accelerating warming is non-linear. So they can act far more quickly than “common sense” might suggest, because they obey the rules of nonlinear math.

Percentages and “proportionality” just don’t work for positive feedback. If you’ve ever tried to shield your ears from a screeching amplifier that feeds sound from speakers right back into a microphone, you know. The shriek blows up before you can put your hands over your ears. And it doesn’t really depend on precisely how close you put the microphone to the speakers. That’s a classic example of positive feedback, albeit on a human not a geographic scale.

For global warming, we know similar feedback mechanisms are at work. But we can’t quantify them because we can’t get the data. Melting permafrost in Siberia and Northern Canada is hard to study, because it lies in areas that are remote, hard to access, huge, and sparsely populated. Dissociation of methane hydrates at the bottom our our planet’s oceans is even harder to study; much of our oceans are as deep as Everest is high.

It’s also hard to quantify the speed and effect of melting ice. Weird phenomena that might cause the collapse of Greenland’s ice cap and the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica hide from our study under hundreds of meters of solid ice.

In fact, an ice shelf larger than New York City just recently collapsed, as seen on satellite photos. No scientist predicted this collapse in advance. The collapse came at a time of anomalous temperatures in Antarctica, 70 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than usual, for days at time. No one predicted that, either. These unanticipated anomalous events are earmarks of nonlinear positive feedback.

Because we don’t have all the related data, we can’t calculate the precise strength of this feedback loop. Scientists don’t include these phenomena in their projections because they can’t quantify them; so they stay below the radar of non-scientific politicians and government officials. But they are real.

We know for certain that the stable “steady state” of climate that persisted throughout our species’ evolution is becoming unstable and is changing rapidly. It can’t continue as it is while under an accelerating assault of greenhouse gases from both human and now independent sources. Because of positive feedback, those gases will continue to increase, even if all our burning of fossil fuels stopped cold this very year, which it is far from doing.

Our “common sense” only confirms these points of science. Everyone can sense that something more than the slow drip-drip-drip of our exhaust gases into the atmosphere is going on. Year by year, we are watching and suffering as hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, Polar Vortex freezes, heat waves, wildfires and massive droughts increase dramatically in number and severity. Our global climate is now in clear transition, moving irrevocably from the long stability that fostered our species’ evolution to something else. We just don’t know—and as of now have no way of reliably predicting—what the next stable “steady state” will be.

We do know that the surface of the planet Venus, which is entirely shrouded by carbon dioxide, is hot enough to melt lead. At that temperature, few forms of life we know on earth could survive, except maybe the microbes that live near our deep-sea volcanic vents. But we don’t know precisely how Venus got that way, and it is much closer to the Sun. All we know at this point is that there is no geophysical limit on how hot planetary surfaces can get under the wrong conditions.

So if we are precise and honest with ourselves, what can we say about suigenocide? We certainly can’t rule it out, either by nuclear war or by runaway global warming. Based on all that we know now, both could do the job and extinguish us by our own hands.

The best we can say is that runaway warming is less likely to cause a complete suigenocide. A nuclear winter would be global, with global effect. In contrast, warming is likely to sterilize the tropics and the hotter temperate zones long before it makes the higher temperate zones uninhabitable, let alone those beyond the polar circles. So suigenocide by runaway warming is far less likely than that by nuclear war to be complete. Some part—maybe even a substantial part—of our species could survive runaway warming. At least we now think so.

The causes of runaway global warming are also more diffuse. It’s not the project of a single, deranged dictator (or two, if you include Kim Jong Un). Rather, runaway warming, without effective countermeasures, derives from the combined acts and omissions of three entire classes of people, who together comprise a substantial portion of our species.

The first class is the fossil-fuel oligarchs. They include the owners and top managers of fossil-fuel companies, who have spent decades and fortunes denying and throwing doubt on climate science. They also include the leaders of petrostates, such as Russian’s Putin, Saudi Arabia’s MBS, and Venezuela’s Maduro. They use their countries’ oil to garner undeserved wealth and power and oppress their people. To them, the risk of suigenocide by runaway climate changes is just one of many terrible risks they are quite willing to take for personal wealth and power while they live, without regard to our species’ future.

The second class of people is larger but less guilty. It’s the middle-class workers in developed nations who simply want to drive their pickup trucks and SUVs and won’t hear that their doing so is destroying our common climate. The third class—the largest and most innocent one—includes the leaders and the people of developing nations like India, Indonesia and Mexico. They aren’t much responsible for global warming so far, but they don’t want fighting it to block what they see as their cheapest (in the short term) and easiest path to development, modernization and the good life.

What would a rational world do under these circumstances? The richest and most powerful countries would co-opt the third class by assuming most of the burden of energy transformation and by helping the third class with cash grants, technology transfers and fair trade. The second class would be much smaller because of greater public understanding. Gas-hog drivers would understand, for example, that gasoline prices will only get higher as oil begins to run out, that it would be better to convert to renewable energy well before that time, and that the immense costs of climate-driven disasters will only explode dramatically, in unpredictable ways, if we don’t. And, in a rational world, the first class would have much less power—or not exist at all—because rational people would insist on rational leaders with a good plan to face a clear and present danger and its inevitable increase, before it inevitably becomes catastrophic.

As a general principle, human suffering and displacement caused by runaway climate change will decrease in direct proportion to a nation’s distance from the Equator, and (due to sea-level rise) will increase in direct proportion to the length of its low-lying coastlines. A non-scientist spook like Valdimir Putin might think Russia immune by virtue of its northern placement and relatively small coastlines (except in the Arctic). He has said so from time to time. But Russia has another problem: its Siberian tundra. Today, with hardened permafrost, Russia can at least build roads and railroads across that vast space, the better to transit Russia’s eleven time zones on the ground, and to access the region’s vast mineral wealth. But once the permafrost starts to melt, Russia may have not only the globe’s largest and most dangerous source of methane, but also the world’s biggest peat bog. Ask the Irish how that worked for them.

In a rational world, everyone everywhere would be helping to prepare a plan to phase out fossil fuels—coal, oil and gas—as quickly as possible, with the least amount of pain all around, including postponed or thwarted economic development. In today’s world, everyone is busy figuring out how to cash in on the globe’s random distribution of fossil fuels as quickly and as much as possible, racing towards the day when oil and gas, at least, start running short—unexpectedly, just like the catastrophic effects of positive feedback.

That way inevitably lies shortages, price spikes and supply-chain bottlenecks, just like those going on right now as a result of economic sanctions against Russia for Putin’s atrocities in Ukraine. Secondary effects can include food shortages and famines, and possible new wars over fossil fuels. At the end of the day, once oil and gas run out, there will be a vast store of “stranded assets”: drilling rigs (including offshore rigs and the specialized boats to place them), tanker cars, ocean-going tankers, LNG compressors, refineries, oil and gas pipelines and billions of internal combustion engines that run only on gasoline. All these will be useless, rusting hulks—dead-loss investments—when their fuels run out.

As this species-wide idiocy plays itself out, suffering and death will multiply globally. So before our species’ energy conversion is complete, we will no doubt suffer at least a partial suigenocide.

But it probably won’t be total. As bad as unrestrained positive feedback in global warming might be, it’s hard to imagine a scenario in which some small part of our species would not survive, at least somewhere above the Arctic Circle. (Once the Antarctic ice caps melt, the South Polar land area will be far too small to support more than a tiny fraction of the world’s present population. It will also be divided from the rest of the world by a larger and much more impassable Antarctic Ocean.)

So there you have it. Two things could lead to our species’ suigenocide this very century: nuclear war and runaway global warming. The risk of the first is high now, but it should be easier to contain. It is, after all, the project of one man.

Runaway global warming is much harder to stop for two reasons. First, it’s based on real needs and industrial dependence spread across our globe. Second, the delusions and vested interests that keep us from addressing it effectively are widespread and entrenched. The number of people we have to convince or depose from power to avert this kind of suigenocide is incomparably larger than in the case of nuclear war.

Whatever the cause, and however limited in scope it may be, suigenocide, like suicide, is not a good survival strategy. If our species is to face these never-before-encountered risks, it’s going to have to act boldly and in unison. It’s going to have to face hard reality, and suppress comforting but false and counterproductive national and racial narratives. It’s going to have to cooperate closely, and on a global scale. It’s going to have to stop pointing fingers and get to work.

Otherwise, intelligent creatures from another star system will some day visit our little blue planet. They will survey the blasted, still radioactive rubble of our great cities, or they will visit the small remains of human civilization, sweltering in what used to be our frozen north. Through whatever orifices they speak, they will say something like, “What a promising two-legged species! This is the saddest case of suigenocide we’ve yet seen in this galaxy.”

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