Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

by Elizabeth Kolbert

People have, by now, directly transformed more than half the ice-free land on earth—some twenty-seven million square miles—and indirectly half of what remains.

Atmospheric warming, ocean warming, ocean acidification, sea-level rise, deglaciation, desertification, eutrophication—these are just some of the by-products of our species’s success.

“Drive out nature though you will with a pitchfork,” Horace wrote in 20 B.C., “yet she will always hurry back, and before you know it, will break through your perverse disdain in triumph.”

“Really what I am is a futurist,” she said at another point. “Our project is acknowledging that a future is coming where nature is no longer fully natural.”

“If we can extend the life of the reef by twenty, thirty years, that might be just enough for the world to get its act together on emissions, and it might make the difference between having nothing and having some sort of functional reef,” Hardisty told me. “I mean, it’s really sad that we have to talk like that. But that’s where we are now.”

Thanks to this intervention, average global temperatures have, since Watt’s day, risen by 1.1° Celsius (2° Fahrenheit). This has led to a variety of increasingly unhappy consequences. Droughts are growing deeper, storms fiercer, heat waves deadlier. Wildfire season is getting longer and the fires more intense. The rate of sea-level rise is accelerating. A recent study in the journal Nature reported that, since the 1990s, melt off of Antarctica has increased threefold. Another recent study predicted that most atolls will, in another few decades, become uninhabitable; this includes entire nations, like the Maldives and the Marshall Islands. To paraphrase J. R. McNeill paraphrasing Marx, “Men make their own climate, but they do not make it just as they please.”

Then there’s the issue of equity. Since carbon emissions are cumulative, those most to blame for climate change are those who’ve emitted the most over time. 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.

While we were talking, a friend of Schrag’s showed up at his office. Schrag introduced her as Allison Macfarlane, a professor at George Washington University and a former head of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. When he told her we were discussing geoengineering, she made a thumbs-down gesture. “It’s the unintended consequences,” she said. “You think you’re doing the right thing. From what you know of the natural world, it should work. But then you do it and it completely backfires and something else happens.” “The real world of climate change is that we’re up against it,” Schrag responded. “Geoengineering is not something to do lightly. The reason we’re thinking about it is because the real world has dealt us a shitty hand.” “We dealt it ourselves,” Macfarlane said.

I brought up the issue of climate change. Perhaps, I suggested hopefully, it would ward off another ice age and more D–O events. At least we could dodge that particular disaster! Steffensen was unimpressed by my suggestion. He pointed out that if you believed the climate to be inherently unstable, the last thing you’d want to do is mess around with it. He recited an old Danish saying, whose pertinence I didn’t entirely understand but which nonetheless stuck with me. He translated it as, “Pissing in your pants will only keep you warm for so long.”