Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

by Elizabeth Kolbert

“I’m a realist,” Gates told me at one point. “I cannot continue to hope that our planet is not going to change radically. It already is changed.”

To Darwin, Nuns and fantails and tumblers and Barbs provided crucial, albeit indirect, support for transmutation. Simply by choosing which birds could reproduce, pigeon breeders had developed lineages that barely resembled one another. “If feeble man can do [so] much by his powers of artificial selection,” there was, Darwin speculated, “no limit to the amount of change” that could be effected by “nature’s power of selection.”

A century and a half after On the Origin of Species, Darwin’s argument-by-analogy is still compelling, though every year it gets harder to keep the terms straight. “Feeble man” is changing the climate, and this is exerting strong selective pressure. So are myriad other forms of “global change”: deforestation, habitat fragmentation, introduced predators, introduced pathogens, light pollution, air pollution, water pollution, herbicides, insecticides, and rodenticides. What do you call natural selection after The End of Nature?

Since no one knows how many creatures depend on reefs, no one can say how many would be threatened by their collapse; clearly, though, the number is enormous. It’s estimated that one out of every four creatures in the oceans spends at least part of its life on a reef.

Paul Kingsnorth, a British writer and activist, has put it this way: “We are as gods, but we have failed to get good at it…We are Loki, killing the beautiful for fun. We are Saturn, devouring our children.”

With just four percent of the world’s population, the United States is responsible for almost thirty percent of aggregate emissions. The countries of the European Union, with about seven percent of the globe’s population, have produced about twenty-two percent of aggregate emissions. For China, home to roughly eighteen percent of the globe’s population, the figure is thirteen percent. India, which is expected soon to overtake China as the world’s most populous nation, is responsible for about three percent. All the nations of Africa and all the nations of South America put together are responsible for less than six percent.

The first government report on global warming—though the phenomenon was not yet called “global warming”—was delivered to President Lyndon Johnson in 1965.

“As a geologist, I think about timescales,” he went on. “The timescale of the climate system is centuries to tens of thousands of years. If we stop CO2 emissions tomorrow, which, of course, is impossible, it’s still going to warm at least for centuries, because the ocean hasn’t equilibrated. That’s just basic physics. We’re not sure how much additional warming that is, but it could easily be another seventy percent beyond what we’ve experienced. So in that sense, we’re already at 2°C. We’re going to be lucky to stop at 4°C. That’s not optimistic or pessimistic. I think that’s objective reality.” (A 4°C global temperature increase—7.2° F—is not just well beyond the official threshold of disaster, it’s heading into territory that’s probably best described as unthinkable.)