Dot Earth Blog: Can Humans Get Used to Having a Two-Way Relationship with Earthâ€™s Climate?

Earlier this summer, I was invited to write an essay on humanity's troubled relationship with the changing atmosphere for a special issue of Audubon Magazine centered on the Audubon Society's comprehensive new report on birds in a changing climate.

The issue is now published online and in print and has a range of excellent features, including "How Climate Change is Sinking Seabirds" by Carl Safina, "Why U.S. Forests Are Fueling Europe" by T. Edward NIckens, "Rethinking How We Think about Climate Change" by Elizabeth Kolbert, and a stunning photo essay on climate change.

In part, my article, "How We Ran Out of Airtime," considers the current human-generated carbon dioxide buildup in relation to a tumultuous period of atmospheric disruption triggered by another life form some 2.4 billion years ago. Here's the opening section:

It should be no surprise, first of all, that humanity is taking its time absorbing and confronting what's going on. Our interactions with climate, for far more than 99 percent of history, ran in one direction: Precipitation or temperatures changed, ice sheets or coastlines or deserts advanced or retreated, and communities thrived, suffered, or adjusted how or where they lived. Only a couple of decades have passed since people outside of a tiny community of scientists began to grasp that the human-climate relationship, in measurable but still subtle ways, now runs in two directions….

We are different from other life-forms that have become planet-scale powerhouses. Take blue-green cyanobacteria, organisms that began flooding the atmosphere with oxygen some 2.4 billion years ago. Some earth scientists call that atmospheric jolt the great Oxygen Catastrophe, because the buildup of oxygen was toxic to most other species at the time. And yes, you could step back and say there's not much of a difference between our carbon binge and that oxygen outburst. Except those mats of photosynthesizing slime weren't looking up at the sky, measuring and marveling at what they'd done. Through science, we are. With awareness comes responsibility, at least in theory. I'm pretty sure cyanobacteria are not self-aware.

Luckily it's still too early to describe the ongoing buildup of human-generated greenhouse gases as the great Carbon Dioxide Catastrophe. Climate scientists say there's still "space" in the climate system for the CO2 from burning roughly another 500 billion tons of carbon before long-lasting shifts in temperature, weather patterns and sea level guarantee a daunting future for our species and many of our companions on this planet.

I argue for moving away from a "solve the problem" approach to global warming to a more realistic long-term framing:

[H]ow do we develop a sustainable, two-way relationship with the atmosphere and climate? How do we limit warming and gird ourselves smartly for the future? First, it would help to conceive of global warming less as a problem to be solved and more as a legacy issue to be consistently addressed. Too often we've heard calls to "seal the deal" (on a binding treaty) and "solve the climate crisis" in ways that imply this is the task of a single president or generation. A more realistic view is that we need a new relationship with energy to go with our evolving new relationship with climate. Addressing both sources of emissions and sources of societal and ecological risk is something to do as routinely, and passionately, as we work on poverty reduction and health care. It took a century to get deep into the fossil era; it will take decades to get out.

Photo Credit Andrew C. Revkin

The closing section centers on a them I've explored before on Dot Earth — the value of a diverse array of approaches to climate-friendly energy progress:

The "super wicked" complexity of the greenhouse challenge, as first described by the young climate analyst Kelly Levin and some colleagues in 2007, guarantees that a mix of approaches—the "silver buckshot" of Bill McKibben, the veteran climate writer and campaigner—is needed. In action as in evolution, diversity is adaptive. McKibben has mostly shaped his 350.org movement around confrontation, for example, attacking big oil companies and pressing university trustees and politicians to pull fossil fuel investments. But the group has also staged "work parties" in which communities gather together to make such environmentally friendly changes as planting trees and erecting solar and wind energy installations. At the same time, innovators like the Caltech chemist Nate Lewis focus on pushing forward photovoltaics and other energy technologies. Entrepreneur Billy Parish of Mosaic is devising new investment models to foster expanded solar panel use. Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations Secretary-General, has wisely approached the world's interlaced climate and energy challenges along two tracks, pairing climate-smart diplomacy with expanded sustainable energy access for the world's still un-electrified billions.

One of the most exciting signs of a change in thinking came in a powerful essay written for Yale Environment 360 by two former Democratic senators, Tim Wirth and Tom Daschle—long champions of such top-down tools as laws and treaties. They laid out a new approach to climate progress that fits our variegated world:

"We think the time has come for the international community to alter its collective climate strategy, cease the search for the impossible all-encompassing top-down agreement—described unattractively as "burden sharing"—and instead encourage an approach that builds on national self-interest and spurs a race to the top in low-carbon energy solutions. This would change the psychology of the climate change issue from one of burden to opportunity, and change the likely outcome from one of hand-wringing about failure to excitement about tangible action to build a better world."

Their call replaces the unachievable quest of building a binding treaty with an inclusive and sustained search for productive paths on energy and the environment. And as that kind of approach spreads—from international diplomacy to household decisions to career choices made by students—I see solid prospects that we can win this race with ourselves. We can move from awareness to responsibility to meaningful action and pass on a planet to the coming generations that, while unavoidably bearing our footprint, remains something beautiful to behold.

The piece is best read from beginning to end, of course. So please click here and do so, then return to discuss your reactions.