Sineia Bezerra do Vale, indígena do povo Wapichana, atua há ao menos três décadas com discussões sobre a emergência do clima e defende que cientistas incluam as experiências dos povos tradicionais nos estudos sobre o assunto.
Sineia Bezerra do Vale, lidernaça indígena do povo Wapichana, ao receber o prêmio “Cientista indígena do Brasil”, em São Paulo — Foto: Patricia Zuppi/Rede RCA/Cristiane Júlião/Divulvação
Referência em Roraima por estudos sobre a crise climática em comunidades indígenas, a gestora ambiental Sineia Bezerra do Vale agora também é “cientista indígena do Brasil” reconhecida pelo Planetary Guardians, iniciativa que discute a emergência do clima em todo o mundo e tem como foco restaurar a estabilidade da Terra.
Indígena do povo Wapichana, Sineia do Vale recebeu o título no último dia 25 em São Paulo, no mesmo evento em que o cientista brasileiro Carlos Nobre, referência global nos efeitos das mudanças climáticas na Amazônia, foi anunciado com novo membro dos Planetary Guardians – guardiões planetários, em português.
Sineia do Vale tem como principal atuação o foco sobre a crise do clima, que impacta em consequências devastadoras em todo o mundo. Foi dela o primeiro estudo ambiental sobre as transformações do clima ao longo dos anos na vida dos povos tradicionais em Roraima.
Ao receber o prêmio de “cientista indígena do Brasil” das mãos de Carlos Nobre, a defensora ambiental destacou que quando se trata da crise climática, a ciência também precisa levar em conta a experiência de vida que os indígenas vivenciam no dia a dia – discurso que ela sempre defende nos debates sobre o assunto.
“Esse é um momento muito importante para os povos indígenas. Neste momento em que a gente se coloca junto com a ciência que chamamos de ciência universal, a ciência indígena tem uma importância tanto quanto a que os cientistas traduzem para nós, principalmente na questão do clima”, disse Sineia do Vale.
Sineia do Vale (terceira mulher da direira para a esquerda) atua há anos com foco na crise climática e os povos indígenas — Foto: Patricia Zuppi/Rede RCA/Cristiane Júlião/Divulvação
No evento em São Paulo, ela exemplificou como a crise climática é percebida nas comunidades. “Os indígenas já colocaram em seus planos de enfrentamento às mudanças climáticas que as águas já aqueceram, que os peixes já sumiram e que não estamos mais vivendo o período de adaptação, mas o de crise climática.”
“Precisamos de resposta rápidas. Não podemos mais deixar que os países não cumpram seus acordos porque à medida que o globo terrestre vai aquecendo, os povos indígenas sofrem nas suas terras com grandes catástrofes ambientais”, destacou a gestora.
A indicação para que Sineia recebesse o título ocorreu após indicação da ativista ambiental e geógrafa Hindou Oumarou, que é co-presidente do Fórum Internacional de Povos Indígenas sobre Mudanças do Clima e presidente do Fórum Permanente da ONU sobre questões indígenas chadiana.
Além da roraimense, também receberam a honraria de “cientista indígena do Brasil”: as antropólogas indígenas Braulina Baniwa e Cristiane Julião, do povo Pankararu, confundadoras da Articulação Nacional das Mulheres Guerreiras da Ancestralidade (Anmiga), e o antropólogo e escritor Francisco Apurinã, que pesquisa mudanças ecológicas na perspectiva indígena pela Universidade de Helsinki, na Finlândia.
Mais sobre Sineia do Vale
Sineia do Vale participa desde 2011 da Conferência das Nações Unidas sobre as Mudanças Climáticas – COP, em inglês, e promove junto às lideranças indígenas a avaliação climática a partir do conhecimento ancestral.
Ela também participa ativamente das discussões internacionais sobre mudanças climáticas há mais de 20 anos, entre elas, a Conferência de Bonn sobre Mudanças Climáticas – chamada de SB60, que ocorre todos os anos em Bonn, na Alemanha. Este ano, a COP29 ocorrerá de 11 a 24 de novembro em Baku, capital do Azerbaijão.
No ano passado, ela foi recebeu o “Troféu Romy – Mulheres do Ano“, honraria concedida a mulheres que se destacaram em suas áreas de atuação em 2023.
Gestora ambiental de formação, Sineia cursa mestrado em Sustentabilidade junto a Povos e Territórios Tradicionais na Universidade de Brasília (UnB), coordena o Departamento de Gestão Territorial e Ambiental do Conselho Indígena de Roraima (CIR), e integra a Convenção-Quadro das Nações Unidas sobre a Mudança do Clima (UNFCCC), focada na agenda indígena e a implementação de ações em nível local.
Flooding from Hurricane Helene in Asheville, North Carolina, on Saturday. Photograph: Melissa Sue Gerrits/Getty Images
Nestled in the bucolic Blue Ridge mountains of western North Carolina and far from any coast, Asheville was touted as a climate “haven” from extreme weather. Now the historic city has been devastated and cut off by Hurricane Helene’s catastrophic floodwaters, in a stunning display of the climate crisis’s unlimited reach in the United States.
Helene, which crunched into the western Florida coast as a category 4 hurricane on Thursday, brought darkly familiar carnage to a stretch of that state that has experienced three such storms in the past 13 months, flattening coastal homes and tossing boats inland.
But as the storm, with winds peaking at 140mph (225 km/h), carved a path northwards, it mangled places in multiple states that have never seen such impacts, obliterating small towns, hurling trees on to homes, unmooring houses that then floated in the floodwater, plunging millions of people into power blackouts and turning major roads into rivers.
In all, about 100 people have died across five states, with nearly a third of these deaths occurring in the county containing Asheville, a city of historic architecture where new residents have flocked amid boasts by real estate agents of a place that offers a reprieve from “crazy” extreme weather.
Now, major highways into Asheville have been severed by flooding from surging rainfall, its mud-caked and debris-strewn center turned into a place where access to cellphone reception, gasoline and food is scarce. The water supply, as well as the roads, is expected to be affected for weeks. It is, according to Roy Cooper, North Carolina’s governor, an “unprecedented tragedy”.
“Everyone thought this was a safe place, somewhere you could move with your kids for the long term, so this is just unimaginable, it’s catastrophic,” said Anna Jane Joyner, a climate campaigner who grew up in the area and whose family still lives in Black Mountain, near Asheville. Several of her friends narrowly avoided being swept away by the floodwater.
“I never, ever considered the idea that Asheville would be wiped out,” she said. “It was our backup plan to move there, so the irony is stark and scary and it’s hard for me to emotionally process. I’ve been working in the climate movement for 20 years and feel like I’m now living in a movie I imagined in my head when I started. Nowhere is safe now.”
The damage wrought by Helene is “a staggering and horrific reminder of the ways that the climate crisis can turbocharge extreme weather”, according to Al Gore, the former US vice-president. Hurricanes gain strength from heat in the ocean and atmosphere and Helene, one of the largest ever documented, sped across a record-hot Gulf, quickly turning from a category 1 to a category 4 storm within a day.
Extra heat not only helps storms spin faster, it also holds more atmospheric moisture that is then unleashed in torrents upon places such as western North Carolina, which got a month’s rain in just a couple of days. Helene was the eighth category 4 or 5 hurricane to strike the US since 2017 – the same number of such extreme storms to hit the country in the previous 57 years.
“This storm has the fingerprints of climate change all over it,” said Kathie Dello, North Carolina’s state climatologist. “The ocean was warm and it grew and grew and there was a lot of water in the atmosphere. Unfortunately, our worst fears came true. Helene was supercharged by climate change and we should expect more storms like this going forward.”
Dello said that it would take months or even years for communities, particularly in the poorer, more rural areas of the state that have been cut off completely by the storm, to recover, compounding the impacts of previous storms such as Florence, in 2018, and Fred, in 2021, that pose major questions over how, if at all, to rebuild.
“I don’t know where you run to escape climate change. Everywhere has some sort of risk,” she said. “It’s really been quite rattling to see these places which you love be devastated, knowing they have been changed forever. We can’t just rebuild like before.”
Heavy rains from Hurricane Helene caused record flooding and damage in Asheville, North Carolina. Photograph: Melissa Sue Gerrits/Getty Images
In Asheville, the historic area of Biltmore Village has been submerged underwater while, in a gloomy irony, the US’s premier climate data center has been knocked offline.
The storm has been “devastating for our folks in Asheville”, said a spokesperson for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who said the National Centers for Environmental Information facility had lost its water supply and had shut down.
“Even those who are physically safe are generally without power, water or connectivity,” the spokesperson said of the effort to contact the center’s marooned staff.
The destruction may cast a shadow over the climate-haven reputation of Asheville, much like how Vermont’s apparent distance from the climate crisis has been rethought in the wake of recentfloods, but it probably won’t defy a broader trend where Americans are flocking to some of the places most at risk from heatwaves, storms and other climate impacts due to the ready availability of housing and jobs.
“This flood will likely accelerate development,” said Jesse Keenan, an expert in climate adaptation at Tulane University, who noted that for every one person who moves away from Asheville, three people move to the city, one of the highest such ratios in the US.
“Some people will not be inclined or unable to rebuild and their properties will be bought up by wealthy people who can afford to build private infrastructure and buildings that have the engineering resilience to withstand floods.”
“There is no truly safe place,” Keenan, who previously listed Asheville as one of the better places to move amid the climate crisis, acknowledged. But the city will “see a post-disaster boom”, he said. “This is a cycle that has happened over and over again in America.”
Cooling the earth by blocking out the sun, although potentially disastrous, is now a real answer to climate change. As a Harvard research paper published late last year proved, solar geo-engineering is both technically feasible and relatively cheap. With governments and international bodies considering the technology, a South African university has just announced a study. But how convenient is this answer for our politicians and heavy emitters?
I.Global Hollywood
In his book The Planet Remade: How Geo-engineering Could Change the World, Oliver Morton laid down a potential scenario from the not-too-distant future. As briefings editor at The Economist and former chief news and features editor at the scientific journal Nature, it was a given that this scenario—a thought experiment on the deployment into the stratosphere of “climate engineering” aerosols—would be based more in science fact than science fiction. Which is exactly what made it, like the best work of Robert Heinlein or Charlie Brooker, truly terrifying.
According to a Harvard study published in November 2018, three years after the release of Morton’s book, it would work in practice like this: a fleet of purpose-built aircraft, with disproportionately large wings relative to their fuselages, so as to allow “level flight at an altitude of 20 kilometres while carrying a 25-ton payload,” would inject 0.2 million tons of sulphur dioxide into the lower stratosphere per year—thereby reflecting enough solar radiation back out into space to cut the rate of global warming progressively in half. Pre-launch costs in 2018 values would come in at $3.5 billion, with yearly operating costs at $2.25 billion. Given that in 2017 around 50 nations had military budgets of $3 billion or more, noted the Harvard scientists, the barriers to entry would be remarkably low.
“It is not a large nation that does it—indeed, it is not a single nation’s action at all,” speculated Morton back in 2015. “Sometime in the 2020s, there is a small group of them, two of which are in a position to host the runways. They call themselves the Concert; once they go public, others call them the Affront. None of them is a rich nation, but nor are they among the least developed. All of them already have low carbon-dioxide emissions, and all of them are on pathways to no emissions at all. In climate terms, they look like the good guys. But their low emissions and the esteem of the environmentally conscious part of the international community are doing nothing to reduce the climate-related risks their citizens face.”
So why “truly terrifying”?
Because, as Morton went on to explain, solar geo-engineering—otherwise known as solar radiation management, or SRM—was not (or at least was no longer) a conceptual absurdity. When he wrote his book, its probability of deployment was already based on two of the most urgent existential questions in the history of humanity: 1) Are the risks of climate change great enough to warrant serious action aimed at mitigating them? 2) Will the world’s largest industrial economies be able to lower their carbon emissions to net zero by the middle of the century?
But terrifying more specifically because, by 2018, the answer to the first question was a scientifically unqualified “yes” and to the second a statistically implausible “no”—and yet the effect of SRM on the biosphere was still unknown. With the results from the Harvard study leading to the scheduling of tests as early as the first half of 2019, the Berlin-based climate science and policy institute Climate Analytics wasted no time in recommending a global ban on the technology.
“Solar radiation management aims at limiting temperature increase by deflecting sunlight, mostly through injection of particles into the atmosphere,” the institute noted. “At best, SRM would mask warming temporarily, but more fundamentally is itself a potentially dangerous interference with the climate system.”
SRM, argued the scientists at Climate Analytics, would “alter the global hydrological cycle as well as fundamentally affect global circulation patterns such as monsoons.” It would not “halt, reverse or address in any other way the profound and dangerous problem of ocean acidification which threatens coral reefs and marine life as it does not reduce CO2 emissions and hence influence atmospheric C02 concentration.” Also, the scientists pointed out, the approach was “unlikely to attenuate the effects of global warming on global agricultural production” as its “potentially positive effect due to cooling” was projected to be counterbalanced by “negative effects on crop production of reducing solar radiation at the earth’s surface.”
In other words, according to Climate Analytics, while cooler temperatures would be helpful to the world’s farmers, the crops would still need sunlight to grow. And none of the above even counted as the number one reason that the institute was raising the alarm—SRM’s gravest danger, these scientists and policy experts insisted, was that it would divert attention from the core problem, which remained the unprecedented amount of carbon being spewed daily into the atmosphere by the extraction of coal, crude oil and natural gas.
For Morton, this was the predicament known as the “superfreak pivot”—the turning of large masses of humanity from the position that “global warming requires no emissions reduction because it isn’t a real problem” to the position that “the Concert has it all covered”. It was a predicament highlighted too by Harvard scientist David Keith, who told the Guardian in 2017:
“One of the main concerns I and everyone involved in this have is that Trump might tweet ‘geoengineering solves everything—we don’t have to bother about emissions.’ That would break the slow-moving agreement among many environmental groups that sound research in this field makes sense.”
As for South Africa, less than two months after publication of the seminal Harvard paper of late 2018, a press release was issued by the African Climate and Development Initiative of the University of Cape Town.
“UCT researchers to embark on pioneering study on potential impacts of solar geoengineering in southern Africa,” it stated.
II. Local Hollywood
As the recipient of a grant from the international DECIMALS Fund (Developing Country Impacts Modelling Analysis for SRM), the UCT team cited two reasons for going ahead with the study—and both of them had to do with the social and economic havoc that anthropogenic climate change had so far wrought in our corner of the world. First, the 2015/16 summer rainfall failure over southern Africa, which led to 30 million people becoming food insecure in South Africa, Mozambique, Botswana and Zimbabwe. Second, Cape Town almost running out of water in 2018. If SRM could be done in a safe and reliable manner, so the rationale went, it was “the only known way” to quickly offset the temperature increases that were behind the droughts.
“We want to understand the impact of solar radiation management on drought conditions,” Dr Romaric Odoulami, the project’s leader, told Daily Maverick, “that’s our motivation. What will the implications be for regional agriculture? But I want to make one thing clear: SRM has never been implemented in the real world… and we are not going to do it either.”
What the African Climate and Development Initiative was going to do, said Odoulami, was climate modelling. The project, he added, would run for the next “one or two years”—as soon as he got “something interesting,” he promised, he would let Daily Maverick know. For the moment, he wanted to leave us with this:
“Solar radiation management doesn’t stop climate change. It doesn’t stop global emissions of greenhouse gases. The only thing it does is help to reduce the global temperature by reducing the amount of solar radiation reaching the earth’s surface.”
This caution in the face of the sheer unprecedented scale of the thing was also detectable in the words of Andy Parker, project director of the Solar Radiation Management Governance Initiative, the UK-based organisation—founded in 2010 by, among others, The World Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society—that set up the DECIMALS Fund in 2018. Speaking to Daily Maverick from a conference in Bangladesh, Parker was vague yet morbidly fascinating on the legislative context that could eventually give the green light to SRM.
“That’s really tricky to predict,” he said. “We can imagine various different deployment scenarios. There’s the desperation scenario, where a country or perhaps a coalition of countries that are really suffering from climate change decide that they are going to use solar geo-engineering to stop the temperature from rising. That could be seen as unilateral and illegitimate deployment. At the other end of things, it’s possible that through the United Nations—the UN General Assembly or one of the UN conventions—there’s a much broader coalition that comes together with much more legitimacy to develop a decision-making infrastructure for if we were to ever use this, or indeed, for how we would reject it.
“Really, at this stage, we don’t know what’s going to happen. We don’t know what’s going to happen with the research, we don’t know how governments are going to deal with this, and we don’t know how quickly and how deeply the impacts of climate change are going to bite.”
In South Africa, unfortunately, all indications are that the bite is going to be serious. As Daily Maverick learned from the country’s leading land-based climate scientist in October last year, we are warming at twice the global average. At 3°C of global warming, which is 6°C regionally—and which at current emission rates we are steaming towards, as per the most conservative estimates, before the end of the century—there will be a total collapse of the maize crop and livestock industry. This is something that the Department of Environmental Affairs seems to understand well, as evidenced by their “Third National Communication” under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, submitted in March 2018.
But the other unknown factor in this general SRM universe of “unknown unknowns” is the person that currently sits atop the DEA. Has Nomvula Mokonyane, who was named at the State Capture inquiry on Monday for allegedly accepting bribes in the form of monthly cash payments, even read the Third National Communication? Does President Cyril Ramaphosa plan on replacing her with someone who will? Aside from Tito Mboweni at treasury, does anyone in the upper echelons of the ANC get the urgency of the situation?
These are the questions that highlight the possibility of South Africa one day performing the superfreak pivot. Because it might not only suit the government to defer to technology when the food and water shortages get real, it might also suit Sasol, the coal mining companies and the country’s heavy emitters at large. DM
Solar Radiation Modification refers to deliberate, large-scale interventions in the global climate system to increase the amount of sunlight reflected away from the planet to reduce global temperatures. Illustrative image: (Generated with Flux AI)
In a webinar on Tuesday, scientists and other experts agreed on the need for solar geoengineering research to enhance the portfolio of climate change responses.
Solar geoengineering, whether through space mirrors or stratospheric particles, is a complex, controversial and contentious field. In a webinar on Tuesday, atmospheric scientists and other experts from across Africa agreed that it is completely rational to explore its role in a portfolio of climate change responses.
Geoengineering refers to deliberate, large-scale interventions in the Earth’s natural systems with the aim of counteracting climate change. The primary goal of geoengineering is to mitigate the adverse effects of global warming and manage the Earth’s climate system. There are two main categories of geoengineering: Solar Radiation Management (SRM) and Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR).
The webinar focused on the former, which The Alliance for Just Deliberation on Solar Geoengineering says refers to “deliberate, large-scale interventions in the global climate system to increase the amount of sunlight reflected away from the planet to reduce global temperatures”.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its Sixth Assessment Report defines SRM as “a range of radiation modification measures not related to greenhouse gas mitigation that seek to limit global warming. Most methods involve reducing the amount of incoming solar radiation reaching the surface, but others also act on the longwave radiation budget by reducing optical thickness and cloud lifetime.”
(Source: The Alliance for Just Deliberation on Solar Geoengineering)
Hassaan Sipra, director of global engagement at The Alliance and a climate researcher, explained that SRM – in line with conclusions by the IPCC – is not meant to stop climate change but only to buy time for the deep reductions in greenhouse gas emissions needed to limit global warming. He also set out the context wherein SRM was an increasingly attractive area of research.
During the UN climate conference in Paris, the world agreed to accelerate efforts to limit the global average temperature increase over pre-industrial levels to below 1.5°C. At present, we are on a trajectory to exceed even 2°C. This is important because every fraction of a degree drastically increases the risks associated with anthropogenic climate change.
“And typically, now, within this context,” said Sipra, “what is being talked about is the use of carbon dioxide removal technologies. So we know that we’re not going to get to net zero emissions until about 2100 if we’re looking for 1.5°C. If it’s 2°C, we’re not going to get there until after 2100. So in the meantime, we also need to start scaling up our carbon dioxide removal technologies so that whatever carbon is in the atmosphere, we are immediately able to capture it and bring that back.”
Put differently, carbon removal will still be necessary in the future because even with significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, existing atmospheric carbon levels must be reduced to meet net zero targets and stabilise global temperatures, as outlined in the Paris Agreement. This ensures long-term climate goals are achievable by offsetting any remaining emissions.
Sipra explained that the problem with carbon dioxide removal was the interrelated problems of cost and scale.
It’s “an expensive technology or a set of technologies that would take a long time to scale up and would require a tremendous amount of resources, and at present, those resources are not yet scalable… they’re not yet available, the technologies are not yet fully tested, and so we need a lot of time before we’re going to get to carbon dioxide removal technologies.
“We need time to cut emissions and we need time to get to carbon dioxide removal technologies. Yet climate impacts are continuing to rise in the meantime. And this is the point where for scientists, policymakers, civil society, the deliberation has begun as to what might be the possibility of buying some additional time; putting in a potential stopgap measure.”
Napkin diagram roughly showing SRM’s role in managing climate risks.(This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.)
SRM is a “stopgap measure”, Sipra explained, in contrast to emissions reductions or carbon dioxide removal because “it does not actually offer a solution to our climate problems, it merely masks it. And so, without addressing the root cause of climate change, you are kind of just giving yourself this, in essence, a drug which may delay – potentially – some of the impacts of climate change”.
But just how is SRM meant to achieve this?
Prof Babatunde Abiodun, an expert in climate model developments and applications, shared some details on the state of SRM research and the various approaches being explored and experiments undertaken. Three of the projects he noted are highlighted here:
Stratospheric Aerosol Processes, Budget and Radiative Effects (SABRE): SABRE investigates how tiny particles in the stratosphere may reflect sunlight to cool the Earth. The project is “an extended airborne science measurement programme” and aims to understand the effectiveness and potential impacts of these aerosols so as to strengthen the “scientific foundation to inform policy decisions related to regulating global emissions that impact the stratosphere (eg ozone depleting substances, rocket exhaust) and the potential injection of material into the stratosphere to combat global warming (climate intervention)”.
Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment (SCoPex): SCoPex, a Harvard University-led project, explores the feasibility of dispersing reflective particles in the stratosphere to mimic volcanic cooling effects using a high-altitude balloon to release small amounts of aerosols over a small area. However, the project has recently moved away from its focus on science related to solar geoengineering.
Geoengineering Assessment Across Uncertainties, Scenarios and Strategies (GAUSS): GAUSS evaluates the potential risks and benefits of various geoengineering methods by using complex computer simulations. Early findings suggest that while geoengineering can reduce global temperatures, it may also lead to regional climate changes, emphasising the need for careful, scenario-based planning. They explain that “one challenge today is a degree of arbitrariness in the scenarios used in current SRM simulations”.
SRM and other geoengineering approaches, however, are not without controversy. The main concerns are the potential for unintended environmental side effects, ethical issues regarding the manipulation of natural systems and the risk of unequal impacts on different regions potentially exacerbating global inequalities.
The IPCC says in the Summary for Policymakers of its Sixth Assessment Report that, with high confidence, “solar radiation modification approaches, if they were to be implemented, introduce a widespread range of new risks to people and ecosystems, which are not well understood. Solar radiation modification approaches have the potential to offset warming and ameliorate some climate hazards, but substantial residual climate change or overcompensating change would occur at regional scales and seasonal timescales.
“Large uncertainties and knowledge gaps are associated with the potential of solar radiation modification approaches to reduce climate change risks. Solar radiation modification would not stop atmospheric CO₂ concentrations from increasing or reducing resulting ocean acidification under continued anthropogenic emissions.”
To this, the gathered scientists and experts said that while they recognised the potential risks, these should be weighed against the risk of the status quo or inaction.
“It makes sense to think about SRM as a very risky proposition, but it’s a risky proposition that has to be compared to an alternative risky proposition, which is worsening climate change. So, climate change increases risks to peoples and ecosystems. With each ton of carbon dioxide we’re adding into the atmosphere, with each incremental bit of warming, those risks rise exponentially.
“So, just like climate change has its risks, SRM has risks. It also has potential benefits, and it has a large amount of uncertainties, and none of them are well understood. So, in order to make a comparison against climate change with SRM, we need to really have an informed decision-making process around SRM so that we can have a better sense of its benefits and its drawbacks,” said Sipra.
“We need to explore SRM in the context of worsening climate change,” he said, adding that geoengineering would “not be a discussion if the climate situation had been resolved after the Rio summit when they formulated the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
The fact that the climate is getting worse; the fact that we are not mitigating, is the reason people are beginning to have a conversation about SRM. So, it can only ever be contextualised in comparison to climate change.” DM
Polêmica, a liberação de aerossóis diminuiria a quantidade de luz solar que chega à Terra, mas seus efeitos colaterais negativos poderiam ser maiores que os positivos
Aumentar a quantidade de aerossóis na atmosfera poderia barrar a chegada à Terra de uma pequena fração da luz solar e resfriar provisoriamente o planeta. Cadan Cummings / Jacobs / JETS / NASA-JSC
Depois de ter permanecido em silêncio por 600 anos, o monte Pinatubo, nas Filipinas, acordou em 1991. Uma série de pequenas explosões ao longo de dois meses culminou em uma grande erupção em meados de junho daquele ano, considerada a segunda maior do século passado. Cerca de 200 mil pessoas tiveram de deixar suas casas e mais de 700 morreram no arquipélago filipino como consequência da eclosão. A explosão produziu uma coluna de fumaça e cinzas vulcânicas que se elevou até 40 quilômetros (km) acima da superfície e invadiu a estratosfera, a segunda das cinco camadas da atmosfera que envolve a Terra. Esse manto de partículas em suspensão, geralmente com tamanhos micrométricos, atrapalhou o tráfego aéreo, queimou plantas e cultivos e produziu outros danos locais.
Apesar de ter causado grandes prejuízos materiais e a perda de vidas humanas nas Filipinas, a erupção do Pinatubo é lembrada hoje no meio científico por ter tido uma consequência surpreendente no clima global: a temperatura média da Terra reduziu-se cerca de 0,5 grau Celsius (°C) nos dois anos seguintes à sua atividade vulcânica. A enorme quantidade de partículas em suspensão, os chamados aerossóis, lançada pelo vulcão entrou no sistema de circulação de ar da estratosfera, espalhou-se pelo planeta e atuou por meses como uma espécie de filtro solar: parte dos raios do Sol que chegariam normalmente à superfície terrestre foi refletida ao incidir sobre essa quantidade extra de partículas de aerossóis injetados no sistema. Essa ação produziu um resfriamento temporário do planeta.
Os aerossóis também resfriam a Terra quando estão na troposfera, a camada mais baixa da atmosfera, mas sua ação é mais intensa na estratosfera. O efeito Pinatubo serve de inspiração para uma linha de pesquisa polêmica, cercada de incertezas científicas e riscos ambientais e geopolíticos: a geoengenharia solar ou modificação da radiação solar (SRM, na sigla derivada do inglês). Ela começou a tomar corpo lentamente nos últimos 20 anos em algumas universidades dos Estados Unidos e da Europa à medida que o aquecimento global se tornou mais pronunciado. A ideia central dessa abordagem é aumentar deliberadamente o albedo da Terra, sobretudo na estratosfera, para que ela passe a refletir mais radiação de volta ao espaço e, assim, torne-se um pouco menos quente.
Glauco Lara
O albedo é a fração da luz refletida em relação à absorvida por um corpo ou superfície. Quanto maior o albedo, como em superfícies claras ou brancas, menor a quantidade de calor absorvida. Injetar aerossóis na atmosfera é uma das formas de tentar aumentar o albedo terrestre. Alguns cálculos indicam que uma redução de 1% a 2% da quantidade de radiação solar que normalmente chega à Terra seria suficiente para diminuir sua temperatura média em um 1 °C.
A possibilidade de reduzir a quantidade de radiação solar sobre a Terra começou a ser aventada ainda na década de 1960. Mas sempre foi vista como uma excentricidade perigosa, quase um devaneio. A ideia só ganhou alguma relevância científica depois da erupção do Pinatubo e, mais recentemente, com a emergência da crise climática, causada pelo aumento significativo da temperatua global decorrente da emissão de gases de efeito estufa. Ainda assim, a pesquisa experimental – que envolveria a soltura de alguns quilos de aerossóis na estratosfera para observar seus eventuais efeitos em âmbito local (não global, como ocorreu na gigantesca erupção do vulcão nas Filipinas) – pouco progrediu até hoje em razão da oposição de parte da comunidade científica e de grupos ambientalistas.
“Até agora, existem poucos trabalhos de modelagem climática envolvendo as técnicas de geoengenharia solar”, comenta o físico Paulo Artaxo, do Instituto de Física da Universidade de São Paulo (IF-USP), especialista no estudo de aerossóis atmosféricos. “Nenhum experimento mais significativo foi feito em campo.” Duas abordagens que visam à modificação da radiação solar dominam as discussões. A principal delas é a injeção de aerossóis na estratosfera, a 15 ou 20 km de altitude, conhecida pela sigla SAI, que tenta reproduzir de forma artificial o que as grandes erupções fazem de maneira natural.
Glauco Lara
A outra, vista como de impacto mais localizado, é o clareamento de nuvens marítimas (marine cloud brightening ou MCB). Ela também envolve a liberação de aerossóis (nesse caso, partículas de sal marinho), que funcionam como núcleos de condensação das nuvens. Mas a soltura dessas partículas ocorre em altitudes bem mais baixas, de no máximo 2 km, ainda na troposfera. Com mais aerossóis, as gotas de nuvens ficam menores, refletem mais radiação solar de volta ao espaço e resfriam a superfície. Há outras técnicas cogitadas, como aumentar o albedo em grandes superfícies brancas do planeta, como o Ártico, mas as duas primeiras propostas dominam o debate.
Artaxo colabora com um grupo da Universidade Harvard, dos Estados Unidos, em estudos de modelagem computacional para tentar entender se o comportamento dos aerossóis na estratosfera é realmente similar à sua ação na troposfera. “Precisamos de mais pesquisas sobre esse tema antes de sequer pensarmos em implementar alguma intervenção desse tipo”, comenta o físico da USP, um dos coordenadores do Programa FAPESP de Pesquisa sobre Mudanças Climáticas Globais. “Não temos condições de garantir que a injeção de mais aerossóis não vá, por exemplo, diminuir as chuvas de monções no Sudeste Asiático e colocar em risco uma população de bilhões de pessoas. Se isso ocorrer, quem decide se essa injeção de aerossóis para ou continua? Esse tipo de decisão não pode ficar na mão de um pequeno grupo de países ou de um bilionário que financie um experimento desse tipo.”
Também há indícios de que uma dose extra de aerossóis na estratosfera poderia afetar a camada de ozônio, que protege a vida terrestre da ação nociva da radiação ultravioleta vinda do Sol. Isso sem falar que essas partículas em suspensão são uma forma de poluição do ar. Elas naturalmente se depositam, descem da estratosfera para a troposfera, onde podem causar ou agravar problemas de saúde, sobretudo os respiratórios. Por ora, essas e outras questões não têm respostas satisfatórias.
A posição do físico da USP é partilhada por muitos colegas. “A modificação da radiação solar é um tema sensível e o IPCC [Painel Intergovernamental sobre Mudanças Climáticas, da ONU]reconhece que ainda há muitas incertezas sobre seus potenciais efeitos”, comenta a matemática Thelma Krug, que foi vice-presidente do painel entre 2015 e 2023 e representou o Brasil em negociações internacionais sobre o clima por uma década. “Pessoalmente, sou a favor da pesquisa na área. Mas é preciso ir passo a passo com os experimentos, ter transparência e estabelecer uma governança para esse processo.”
Erupção do vulcão Pinatubo, em 1991, é considerada a segunda maior do século passadoArlan Naeg / AFP via Getty Images
O tema é tão controverso que alguns pesquisadores são contra até que se faça pesquisa sobre as técnicas de geoengenharia solar. Isso porque elas não têm impacto na redução das emissões de gases de efeito estufa, que causam o aumento da temperatura da Terra. Ainda que se mostrem relativamente seguras e eficientes em esfriar temporariamente a Terra, objetivo que hoje é apenas uma hipótese, técnicas como a SAI seriam, no máximo, paliativas. No fundo, dizem os críticos dessa abordagem, os trabalhos nessa área desviariam recursos e tomariam um tempo que poderia ser mais bem empregado na busca por ações que reduzissem a emissão de gases como dióxido de carbono (CO2) e metano (CH4). “Os estudos sobre geoengenharia solar também poderiam ser usados como a desculpa perfeita para que os grandes produtores de gases de efeito estufa não reduzissem suas emissões”, pondera o climatologista Carlos Nobre, do Instituto de Estudos Avançados (IEA) da USP.
Além de ser encarada como um diversionismo em relação à meta central de zerar as emissões de gases de efeito estufa nas próximas décadas, a adoção das técnicas de SRM poderia tornar o planeta refém desse tipo de intervenção climática por um prazo muito longo e indefinido, de décadas ou séculos. Isso criaria um problema extra: o risco de promover o chamado termination shock. Quando o planeta abandonasse o emprego das técnicas de SRM, a temperatura subiria novamente – só que dessa vez de forma muito mais rápida do que no cenário atual de aquecimento global. Isso tornaria quase impossível a adaptação a essa brusca elevação de temperatura. Qualquer oscilação significativa da temperatura, para cima ou para baixo, em um curto período, representa um desafio adaptativo.
Alguns estudos de modelagem climática têm sugerido cenários preocupantes em simulações de possíveis impactos do emprego de técnicas de geoengenharia solar. Esses trabalhos costumam averiguar que outros efeitos (colaterais) essas técnicas de intervenção no clima poderiam induzir, além da redução temporária da temperatura terrestre. Um dos problemas é que a maioria desses estudos se concentra em possíveis consequências no hemisfério Norte, onde ficam os países mais ricos e vive e trabalha a maior parte dos pesquisadores do clima.
Começam, no entanto, a surgir pesquisas com foco em outras partes do planeta. Trabalho publicado em junho deste ano na revista Environmental Research Climate sugere que a adoção da SAI ao longo deste século alteraria os prováveis impactos do aquecimento global sobre a formação de ciclones extratropicais no hemisfério Sul, como aqueles que se formam com certa regularidade na região Sul do Brasil. A previsão é de que, até o fim deste século, o aumento da temperatura global reduza o número de ciclones gerados nessa parte do globo terrestre, mas aumente a intensidade dos fenômenos produzidos. Ou seja, menos ciclones, mas mais fortes.
Glauco Lara
Quando diferentes regimes de injeção de aerossóis na estratosfera são simulados em três modelos climáticos internacionais até 2100, os resultados sinalizam um aumento na frequência de ciclones, mas uma redução em sua força em relação aos prognósticos obtidos em cenários de aquecimento global sem a adoção de qualquer protocolo da SAI. “Não somos contra nem a favor da geoengenharia solar”, diz a pesquisadora Michelle Reboita, da Universidade Federal de Itajubá (Unifei), de Minas Gerais, coordenadora do estudo. “Precisamos é estudá-la. Ela pode produzir resultados positivos em uma parte do mundo e negativos em outra.”
Há também estudos de simulação que tentam prever os possíveis impactos da SAI sobre a biodiversidade. “Nosso objetivo é entender como a SAI pode afetar as espécies de vertebrados terrestres no cenário das mudanças climáticas”, conta o biólogo brasileiro Andreas Schwarz Meyer, que faz estágio de pós-doutorado na Universidade da Cidade do Cabo, na África do Sul, e coordena um projeto de pesquisa sobre o tema. “Em outras palavras, queremos saber quais seriam as espécies ‘vencedoras’ e ‘perdedoras’ no globo caso o emprego dessas técnicas para diminuir a temperatura do planeta venha a se tornar uma realidade.”
No projeto, que ainda está em andamento, Meyer adota uma abordagem chamada perfis horizontais de biodiversidade, que usa dados climáticos históricos para estimar o intervalo térmico (a temperatura máxima e a mínima) e o grau de umidade em que as espécies ocorrem. A técnica é normalmente usada para estimar o impacto sobre as espécies de diferentes cenários de aquecimento global previstos pelo IPCC ao longo deste século.
“Assim, temos uma ideia de quantas espécies serão expostas a essas mudanças, quando e o quão rapidamente isso poderá ocorrer”, comenta o biólogo. Em 2022, o brasileiro publicou um artigo no periódico científico Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B em que simulou os efeitos sobre mais de 30 mil espécies de vertebrados marinhos e terrestres de um cenário particular ao longo deste século: primeiro haveria um aquecimento global superior a 2 °C e, em seguida, ocorreria uma redução de temperatura da Terra de forma artificial, por meio da remoção direta de dióxido de carbono da atmosfera. A retirada do principal gás de efeito estufa é hoje ensaiada por um conjunto de técnicas que, por ora, são muito caras e ineficientes em perseguir esse objetivo.
Trilhas de nuvens criadas no mar pela emissão de partículas de poeira por navios
A conclusão geral do estudo é que a subida e a posterior queda artificial da temperatura terrestre poderiam inviabilizar a sobrevivência de muitas espécies e produziriam danos a essas comunidades décadas após se ter atingido uma hipotética estabilização da temperatura do planeta. Meyer está fazendo um estudo semelhante agora, mas com o emprego da SAI no lugar da remoção direta de carbono.
Os trabalhos de Reboita e Meyer se dão no âmbito de uma iniciativa internacional, a Developing country governance research and evaluation for SRM, ou simplesmente Degrees. Seu objetivo é estimular estudos e formar recursos humanos especializados nas técnicas de modificação da radiação solar em países da África, América Latina e sul da Ásia. A Degrees nasceu na década passada dentro da Academia Mundial de Ciências (TWAS) e posteriormente foi assumida por uma organização não governamental britânica, a homônima Degrees. Ela financia quase 40 projetos. No Brasil, além das pesquisas da meteorologista da Unifei, duas linhas de estudo de professores da Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (UFSC) passaram a ser apoiadas em julho passado.
Com parceiros no exterior, a equipe do engenheiro Mauricio Uriona, do Departamento de Engenharia de Produção e Sistemas da UFSC, pretende estudar como é a percepção do setor produtivo, do governo e da comunidade científica de três países (Brasil, Índia e África do Sul) sobre os potenciais riscos das técnicas de SRM. “Trabalhamos no passado com o tema da transição energética com uma abordagem de cunho socioeconômico e vimos agora uma boa oportunidade de fazer um estudo semelhante sobre geoengenharia solar”, afirma Uriona.
A socióloga ambiental Julia S. Guivant, do Instituto de Pesquisa em Riscos e Sustentabilidade (Iris), da UFSC, vai estudar como diversos atores-chave do país, como a comunidade científica, reguladores políticos, agricultores e representantes de organizações não governamentais, posicionam-se diante dos desafios de governança da geoengenharia solar. “Não temos uma posição sobre se a SRM deve ser usada ou como seu eventual emprego deve ser governado. Somos a favor das pesquisas e do debate democrático sobre o tema, diante dos problemas para atingir as metas de mitigação e adaptação às mudanças climáticas”, diz a socióloga. Colegas da USP e da Universidade Federal de São Paulo (Unifesp) vão colaborar na pesquisa coordenada por Guivant.
Há preocupação de que a geoengenharia solar possa afetar o regime das chuvas de monções na ÍndiaAmarjeet Kumar Singh / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
As técnicas de SRM são tão polêmicas e sem qualquer tipo de regulação em acordos internacionais que mesmo grupos de pesquisas de instituições renomadas enfrentam dificuldades extremas de realizar pequenos experimentos de campo. Esses trabalhos não têm o potencial de influenciar o clima global, no máximo produzir ciência para se entender os processos envolvidos, com alguma alteração localmente. Ainda assim, os obstáculos práticos à sua realização são quase intransponíveis.
Em março deste ano, foi abandonado o Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment (SCoPEx), experimento concebido na década passada pelo grupo do físico-químico Frank Keutsch, da Universidade Harvard. A ideia da iniciativa era usar um balão de alta altitude para injetar 2 quilos de aerossóis (no caso, carbonato de cálcio) cerca de 20 km acima da superfície. “Essa quantidade de partículas é ínfima. Equivale à poluição expelida por um jato comercial durante apenas 1 minuto de voo”, disse Keutsch em entrevista dada em 2021 (ver Pesquisa FAPESP nº 303). O balão do SCoPEx era para ter ganho inicialmente os ares dos Estados Unidos em 2018. Mas isso não ocorreu. Em seguida, sua soltura foi prevista para a Suécia, também sem sucesso. Devido a protestos de ambientalistas e de grupos indígenas, o projeto nunca decolou de fato.
Alguns testes de campo com a técnica de clareamento de nuvens marinhas, uma abordagem menos ambiciosa do que a SAI, têm sido feitos, quase sempre a duras penas e diante de críticas de vários setores da sociedade. Em abril deste ano, um grupo da Universidade de Washington, dos Estados Unidos, usou um tipo de ventilador para espalhar partículas de sal marinho na pista de um navio porta-aviões aposentado que estava estacionado no litoral da cidade de Alameda, na Califórnia. A ideia da iniciativa era apenas ver se as partículas poderiam causar algum mal à saúde. Dois meses mais tarde, o município californiano proibiu esse tipo de experimento em seu território.
Na Austrália, pesquisadores da Southern Cross University e organizações locais tocam desde 2020 um projeto-piloto em que tentam aferir se a técnica de MCB pode ser útil para diminuir o branqueamento de corais na região de Townsville. O objetivo do experimento é averiguar se o método diminuiria localmente a temperatura do oceano no centro da Grande Barreira de Corais. O aquecimento das águas marinhas é a principal causa do branqueamento.
Alterar a capacidade de o Ártico refletir a luz do Sol poderia, em tese, minorar o aquecimento globalsodar99 via Getty Images
A desconfiança dos experimentos de campo deriva, em parte, do surgimento periódico de iniciativas pouco transparentes, geridas às vezes por empresas privadas obscuras. Em 2022, a Make Sunsets, uma startup norte-americana, soltou sem autorização no norte do México dois balões com aerossóis destinados à estratosfera. Pouco depois, o governo mexicano proibiu esse tipo de iniciativa em seu território. Agora, a empresa anunciou que está fazendo esse tipo de experimento nos Estados Unidos, mas os resultados dessas iniciativas são desconhecidos.
Para o físico norte-americano David Keith, da Universidade de Chicago, nos Estados Unidos, o interesse em estimular as pesquisas sobre geoengenharia solar tem aumentado, a despeito das incertezas científicas que cercam o emprego dessas técnicas. “Isso é visível nos principais relatórios internacionais, como os do Programa das Nações Unidas para o Meio Ambiente, do Programa Mundial de Pesquisa do Clima, também da ONU, e de grandes grupos ambientalistas, como Environmental Defense”, comenta Keith, em entrevista por e-mail a Pesquisa FAPESP. “Não há dúvida de que a oposição à investigação enfraqueceu, mas é difícil dizer por quê. Talvez seja por causa do aumento das temperaturas ou porque [acredito que] o mundo esteja fazendo agora esforços substanciais para reduzir as emissões de gases de efeito estufa.”
Keith foi membro do programa de geoengenharia solar de Harvard por 12 anos. Hoje ele é a favor da adoção de uma moratória internacional em experimentos de campo até que a ciência sobre o tema esteja mais bem estabelecida e haja alguma forma de governança internacional. Se esse cenário se materializar algum dia, ele diz que a humanidade deveria considerar a realização de um teste no qual se injetaria por uma década na estratosfera cerca de 10% da quantidade necessária de aerossóis para baixar em 1 °C a temperatura global. Dessa forma, seria possível conferir claramente os efeitos dessa abordagem sem correr muitos riscos.
A operação envolveria transportar cerca de 100 mil toneladas de enxofre por ano para a estratosfera – equivalente a 0,3% da quantidade de poluição por enxofre que chega anualmente à atmosfera – por uma frota de 15 jatinhos capazes de voar em altas altitudes. A operação custaria aproximadamente US$ 500 milhões ao ano. É mais uma ideia polêmica. Para alguns, é possível que a única parte boa da sugestão seja a adoção de uma moratória para esse tipo de experimento.
A reportagem acima foi publicada com o título “Controlando o sol” na edição impressa nº 343, de setembro de 2024.
The climate emulator invites you to explore the controversial climate intervention. I gave it a whirl.
August 23, 2024
James Temple
AI pioneer Andrew Ng has released a simple online tool that allows anyone to tinker with the dials of a solar geoengineering model, exploring what might happen if nations attempt to counteract climate change by spraying reflective particles into the atmosphere.
The concept of solar geoengineering was born from the realization that the planet has cooled in the months following massive volcanic eruptions, including one that occurred in 1991, when Mt. Pinatubo blasted some 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. But critics fear that deliberately releasing such materials could harm certain regions of the world, discourage efforts to cut greenhouse-gas emissions, or spark conflicts between nations, among other counterproductive consequences.
The goal of Ng’s emulator, called Planet Parasol, is to invite more people to think about solar geoengineering, explore the potential trade-offs involved in such interventions, and use the results to discuss and debate our options for climate action. The tool, developed in partnership with researchers at Cornell, the University of California, San Diego, and other institutions, also highlights how AI could help advance our understanding of solar geoengineering.
The current version is bare-bones. It allows users to select different emissions scenarios and various quantities of particles that would be released each year, from 25% of a Pinatubo eruption to 125%.
Planet Parasol then displays a pair of diverging lines that represent warming levels globally through 2100. One shows the steady rise in temperatures that would occur without solar geoengineering, and the other indicates how much warming could be reduced under your selected scenario. The model can also highlight regional temperature differences on heat maps.
You can also scribble your own rising, falling, or squiggling line representing different levels of intervention across the decades to see what might happen as reflective aerosols are released.
I tried to simulate what’s known as the “termination shock” scenario, exploring how much temperatures would rise if, for some reason, the world had to suddenly halt or cut back on solar geoengineering after using it at high levels. The sudden surge of warming that could occur afterward is often cited as a risk of geoengineering. The model projects that global temperatures would quickly rise over the following years, though they might take several decades to fully rebound to the curve they would have been on if the nations in this simulation hadn’t conducted such an intervention in the first place.
To be clear, this is an exaggerated scenario, in which I maxed out the warming and the geoengineering. No one is proposing anything like this. I was playing around to see what would happen because, well, that’s what an emulator lets you do.
Emulators are effectively stripped-down climate models. They’re not as precise, since they don’t simulate as many of the planet’s complex, interconnected processes. But they don’t require nearly as much time and computing power to run.
International negotiators and policymakers often use climate emulators, like En-ROADS, to get a quick, rough sense of the impact that potential rules or commitments on greenhouse-gas emissions could have.
The Parasol team wanted to develop a similar tool specifically to allow people to evaluate the potential effects of various solar geoengineering scenarios, says Daniele Visioni, a climate scientist focused on solar geoengineering at Cornell, who contributed to Planet Parasol (as well as an earlier emulator).
Climate models are steadily becoming more powerful, simulating more Earth system processes at higher resolutions, and spitting out more and more information as they do. AI is well suited to help draw meaning and understanding from that data. It’s getting ever better at spotting patterns within huge data sets and predicting outcomes based on them.
But he says he’s been spending more and more of his time exploring the potential of solar geoengineering (sometimes referred to as solar radiation management, or SRM), given the threat of climate change and the role that AI can play in advancing the research field.
There are “many things one can do—and that society broadly should work on—to help address climate change, first and foremost decarbonization,” he wrote in an email. “And SRM is where I’m focusing most of my climate-related efforts right now, given that this is one of the places where engineers and researchers can make a big difference (in addition to decarbonization).”
In a 2022 piece, Ng noted that AI could play several important roles in geoengineering research, including “autonomously piloting high-altitude drones” that would disperse reflective particles, modeling effects of geoengineering across specific regions, and optimizing techniques.
Planet Parasol itself is built on top of another climate emulator, developed by researchers at the University of Leeds and the University of Oxford, that relies on the rules of physics to project global average temperatures under various scenarios. Ng’s team then harnessed machine learning to estimate the local cooling effects that could result from varying levels of solar geoengineering, says Jeremy Irvin, a grad student in his research group at Stanford.
One of the clearest limits of the current version of the tool, however, is that the results look dazzling. In the scenarios I tested, solar geoengineering cleanly cuts off the predicted rise in temperatures over the coming decades, which it may well do.
That might lead the casual user of such a tool to conclude: Cool, let’s do it!
But even if solar geoengineering does help the world on average, it could still have negative effects, such as harming the protective ozone layer, disturbing regional rainfall patterns, undermining agriculture productivity, and changing the distribution of infectious diseases.
None of that is incorporated in the results as yet. Plus, a climate emulator isn’t equipped to address deeply complex societal concerns. For instance, does researching such possibilities ease pressure to address the root causes of climate change? Can a tool that works at the scale of the planet ever be managed in a globally equitable way? Planet Parasol won’t be able to answer either of those questions.
Holly Buck, an environmental social scientist at the University at Buffalo and author of After Geoengineering, questioned the broader value of such a tool along similar lines.
In focus groups that she has conducted on the topic of solar geoengineering, she’s found that people easily grok the concept that it can curb warming, even without seeing the results plotted out in a model.
“They want to hear about what can go wrong, the impact on precipitation and extreme weather, who will control it, what it means existentially to fail to deal with the root of the problem, and so on,” she said in an email. “So it is hard to imagine who would actually use this and how.”
Visioni explained that the group did make a point of highlighting major challenges and concerns at the top of the page. He added that they intend to improve the tool over time in ways that will provide a fuller sense of the uncertainties, trade-offs, and regional impacts.
“This is hard, and I struggled a lot with your same observation,” Visioni wrote in an email. “But at the same time … I came to the conclusion it’s worth putting something down and work[ing] to improve it with user feedback, rather than wait until we have the perfect, nuanced version.”
As to the value of the tool, Irvin added that seeing the temperature reduction laid out clearly can make a “stronger, lasting impression.”
“We are calling for more research to push the science forward about other areas of concern prior to potential implementation, and we hope the tool helps people understand the capabilities of SAI and support future research on it,” he said.
Right now, every moment of every day, we humans are reconfiguring Earth’s climate bit by bit. Hotter summers and wetter storms. Higher seas and fiercer wildfires. The steady, upward turn of the dial on a host of threats to our homes, our societies and the environment around us.
We might also be changing the climate in an even bigger way.
For the past two decades, scientists have been raising alarms about great systems in the natural world that warming, caused by carbon emissions, might be pushing toward collapse. These systems are so vast that they can stay somewhat in balance even as temperatures rise. But only to a point.
Once we warm the planet beyond certain levels, this balance might be lost, scientists say. The effects would be sweeping and hard to reverse. Not like the turning of a dial, but the flipping of a switch. One that wouldn’t be easily flipped back.
Mass Death of Coral Reefs
When corals go ghostly white, they aren’t necessarily dead, and their reefs aren’t necessarily gone forever. Too much heat in the water causes the corals to expel the symbiotic algae living inside their tissues. If conditions improve, they can survive this bleaching. In time, the reefs can bounce back. As the world gets warmer, though, occasional bleaching is becoming regular bleaching. Mild bleaching is becoming severe bleaching.
Scientists’ latest predictions are grim. Even if humanity moves swiftly to rein in global warming, 70 percent to 90 percent of today’s reef-building corals could die in the coming decades. If we don’t, the toll could be 99 percent or more. A reef can look healthy right up until its corals start bleaching and dying. Eventually, it is a graveyard.
This doesn’t necessarily mean reef-building corals will go extinct. Hardier ones might endure in pockets. But the vibrant ecosystems these creatures support will be unrecognizable. There is no bouncing back anytime soon, not in the places corals live today, not at any scale.
When it might happen: It could already be underway.
Abrupt Thawing of Permafrost
In the ground beneath the world’s cold places, the accumulated remains of long-dead plants and animals contain a lot of carbon, roughly twice the amount that’s currently in the atmosphere. As heat, wildfires and rains thaw and destabilize the frozen ground, microbes get to work, converting this carbon into carbon dioxide and methane. These greenhouse gasses worsen the heat and the fire and the rain, which intensifies the thawing.
Like many of these vast, self-propelling shifts in our climate, permafrost thaw is complicated to predict. Large areas have already come unfrozen, in Western Canada, in Alaska, in Siberia. But how quickly the rest of it might defrost, how much that would add to global warming, how much of the carbon might stay trapped down there because the thawing causes new vegetation to sprout up on top of it — all of that is tricky to pin down.
“Because these things are very uncertain, there’s a bias toward not talking about it or dismissing the possibility, even,” said Tapio Schneider, a climate scientist at the California Institute of Technology. “That, I think, is a mistake,” he said. “It’s still important to explore the risks, even if the probability of occurrence in the near future is relatively small.”
When it might happen: The timing will vary place to place. The effects on global warming could accumulate over a century or more.
Collapse of Greenland Ice
The colossal ice sheets that blanket Earth’s poles aren’t melting the way an ice cube melts. Because of their sheer bigness and geometric complexity, a host of factors shapes how quickly the ice sheds its bulk and adds to the rising oceans. Among these factors, scientists are particularly concerned about ones that could start feeding on themselves, causing the melting to accelerate in a way that would be very hard to stop.
In Greenland, the issue is elevation. As the surface of the ice loses height, more of it sits at a balmier altitude, exposed to warmer air. That makes it melt even faster.
Scientists know, from geological evidence, that large parts of Greenland have been ice-free before. They also know that the consequences of another great melt could reverberate worldwide, affecting ocean currents and rainfall down into the tropics and beyond.
When it might happen: Irreversible melting could begin this century and unfold over hundreds, even thousands, of years.
Breakup of West Antarctic Ice
At the other end of the world from Greenland, the ice of western Antarctica is threatened less by warm air than by warm water.
Many West Antarctic glaciers flow out to sea, which means their undersides are exposed to constant bathing by ocean currents. As the water warms, these floating ice shelves melt and weaken from below, particularly where they sit on the seafloor. Like a dancer holding a difficult pose, the shelf starts to lose its footing. With less floating ice to hold it back, more ice from the continent’s interior would slide into the ocean. Eventually, the ice at the water’s edge might fail to support its own weight and crack into pieces.
The West Antarctic ice sheet has probably collapsed before, in Earth’s deep past. How close today’s ice is to suffering the same fate is something scientists are still trying to figure out.
“If you think about the future of the world’s coastlines, 50 percent of the story is going to be the melt of Antarctica,” said David Holland, a New York University scientist who studies polar regions. And yet, he said, when it comes to understanding how the continent’s ice might break apart, “we are at Day Zero.”
When it might happen: As in Greenland, the ice sheet could begin to recede irreversibly in this century.
Sudden Shift in the West African Monsoon
Around 15,000 years ago, the Sahara started turning green. It began when small shifts in Earth’s orbit caused North Africa to be sunnier each summer. This warmed the land, causing the winds to shift and draw in more moist air from over the Atlantic. The moisture fell as monsoon rain, which fed grasses and filled lakes, some as large as the Caspian Sea. Animals flourished: elephants, giraffes, ancestral cattle. So did humans, as engravings and rock paintings from the era attest. Only about 5,000 years ago did the region transform back into the harsh desert we know today.
Scientists now understand that the Sahara has flipped several times over the ages between arid and humid, between barren and temperate. They are less sure about how, and whether, the West African monsoon might shift or intensify in response to today’s warming. (Despite its name, the region’s monsoon unleashes rain over parts of East Africa as well.)
Whatever happens will matter hugely to an area of the world where many people’s nutrition and livelihoods depend on the skies.
When it might happen: Hard to predict.
Loss of Amazon Rainforest
Besides being home to hundreds of Indigenous communities, millions of animal and plant species and 400 billion trees; besides containing untold numbers of other living things that have yet to be discovered, named and described; and besides storing an abundance of carbon that might otherwise be warming the planet, the Amazon rainforest plays another big role. It is a living, churning, breathing engine of weather.
The combined exhalations of all those trees give rise to clouds fat with moisture. When this moisture falls, it helps keep the region lush and forested.
Now, though, ranchers and farmers are clearing the trees, and global warming is worsening wildfires and droughts. Scientists worry that once too much more of the forest is gone, this rain machine could break down, causing the rest of the forest to wither and degrade into grassy savanna.
By 2050, as much of half of today’s Amazon forest could be at risk of undergoing this kind of degradation, researchers recently estimated.
When it might happen: Will depend on how rapidly people clear, or protect, the remaining forest.
Shutdown of Atlantic Currents
Sweeping across the Atlantic Ocean, from the western coasts of Africa, round through the Caribbean and up toward Europe before heading down again, a colossal loop of seawater sets temperatures and rainfall for a big part of the globe. Saltier, denser water sinks to the ocean depths while fresher, lighter water rises, keeping this conveyor belt turning.
Now, though, Greenland’s melting ice is upsetting this balance by infusing the North Atlantic with immense new flows of freshwater. Scientists fear that if the motor slows too much, it could stall, upending weather patterns for billions of people in Europe and the tropics.
Scientists have already seen signs of a slowdown in these currents, which go by an unwieldy name: the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC. The hard part is predicting when a slowdown might become a shutdown. At the moment, our data and records are just too limited, said Niklas Boers, a climate scientist at the Technical University of Munich and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.
Already, though, we know enough to be sure about one thing, Dr. Boers said. “With every gram of additional CO2 in the atmosphere, we are increasing the likelihood of tipping events,” he said. “The longer we wait” to slash emissions, he said, “the farther we go into dangerous territory.”
The shaded areas on the maps [see here] show the present-day extent of relevant areas for each natural system. They don’t necessarily indicate precisely where large-scale changes could occur if a tipping point is reached.
The New York Times Em julho de 2016, uma onda de calor atingiu Boston, nos EUA, com temperaturas diurnas médias de 33 graus Celsius durante cinco dias consecutivos. Alguns estudantes universitários locais que ficaram na cidade durante o verão tiveram sorte e moravam em dormitórios com ar-condicionado central. Outros estudantes, nem tanto —ficaram presos em dormitórios mais antigos sem ar-condicionado.
Jose Guillermo Cedeño Laurent, um pesquisador da Universidade de Harvard na época, decidiu aproveitar esse experimento natural para ver como o calor, e especialmente o calor à noite, afetava o desempenho cognitivo dos jovens adultos. Ele fez com que 44 alunos realizassem testes de matemática e autocontrole cinco dias antes da temperatura subir, todos os dias durante a onda de calor e dois dias depois.
“Muitos de nós pensamos que somos imunes ao calor”, afirma Cedeño, agora professor assistente de saúde ambiental e ocupacional e justiça na Universidade Rutgers. “Então, algo que eu queria testar era se isso era realmente verdade.”
Acontece que até estudantes universitários jovens e saudáveis são afetados por altas temperaturas. Durante os dias mais quentes, os alunos nos dormitórios sem ar-condicionado, onde as temperaturas noturnas médias eram de 26 graus, tiveram um desempenho significativamente pior nos testes que fizeram todas as manhãs do que os alunos com ar-condicionado, cujos quartos permaneciam agradáveis a 21 graus.
Uma onda de calor está cobrindo novamente o Nordeste, Sul e Centro-Oeste dos EUA. Altas temperaturas podem ter um efeito alarmante em nossos corpos, aumentando o risco de ataques cardíacos, insolação e morte, especialmente entre adultos mais velhos e pessoas com doenças crônicas. Mas o calor também prejudica nossos cérebros, prejudicando a cognição e nos tornando irritáveis, impulsivos e agressivos.
Como o calor nos torna menos inteligentes
Numerosos estudos em ambientes de laboratório produziram resultados semelhantes aos da pesquisa de Cedeño, com pontuações em testes cognitivos diminuindo à medida que os cientistas aumentavam a temperatura na sala.
Isso pode ter consequências reais. R. Jisung Park, um economista ambiental e do trabalho na Universidade da Pensilvânia, analisou as notas de testes padronizados do ensino médio e descobriu que elas caíram 0,2% para cada grau acima de 22 Celsius. Isso pode não parecer muito, mas pode acumular para estudantes fazendo um exame em uma sala sem ar-condicionado durante uma onda de calor de 32 graus.
Em outro estudo, Park descobriu que quanto mais dias mais quentes do que a média havia durante o ano letivo, pior os alunos se saíam em um teste padronizado —especialmente quando o termômetro subia acima de 26 graus. Ele acredita que isso pode ser porque a maior exposição ao calor estava afetando o aprendizado dos alunos ao longo do ano.
O efeito foi “mais pronunciado para estudantes de baixa renda e minorias raciais”, explica Park, possivelmente porque eles tinham menos probabilidade de ter ar-condicionado, tanto na escola quanto em casa.
Por que o calor nos torna agressivos
Pesquisadores descobriram pela primeira vez a ligação entre calor e agressão ao analisar dados de crimes, descobrindo que há mais assassinatos, agressões e episódios de violência doméstica em dias quentes. A conexão também se aplica a atos não violentos: quando as temperaturas sobem, as pessoas são mais propensas a se envolver em discursos de ódio online e a buzinar no trânsito.
Estudos de laboratório confirmam isso. Em um experimento de 2019, as pessoas agiram com mais rancor em relação aos outros enquanto jogavam um videogame especialmente projetado em uma sala quente do que em uma sala fria.
A chamada agressão reativa tende a ser especialmente sensível ao calor, provavelmente porque as pessoas tendem a interpretar as ações dos outros como mais hostis em dias quentes, levando-as a responder da mesma forma.
Kimberly Meidenbauer, professora assistente de psicologia na Washington State University, acha que esse aumento na agressão reativa pode estar relacionado ao efeito do calor na cognição, particularmente na queda no autocontrole. “Sua tendência de agir sem pensar, ou não conseguir se impedir de agir de certa maneira, essas coisas também parecem ser afetadas pelo calor,” afirma.
O que acontece no cérebro
Os pesquisadores não sabem por que o calor afeta nossa cognição e emoções, mas existem algumas teorias.
Uma é que os recursos do cérebro estão sendo desviados para mantê-lo frio, deixando menos energia para todo o resto. “Se você está alocando todo o sangue e toda a glicose para partes do seu cérebro que estão focadas na termorregulação, parece muito plausível que você simplesmente não teria o suficiente para algumas dessas funções cognitivas mais altas,” diz Meidenbauer.
Você também pode ficar distraído e irritado por causa do calor e da tristeza que sente. Acontece que essa é, na verdade, uma das respostas de enfrentamento do cérebro. Se você não conseguir se acalmar, seu cérebro “fará você se sentir ainda mais desconfortável, de modo que encontrar o que você precisa para sobreviver se tornará desgastante”, explicou Shaun Morrison, professor de cirurgia neurológica na Oregon Health and Science University.
O efeito do calor no sono também pode desempenhar um papel. No estudo de Boston, quanto mais quente ficava, mais o sono dos alunos era interrompido —e pior eles se saíam nos testes.
A melhor maneira de compensar esses efeitos é se refrescar o mais rápido possível. Se você não tem acesso ao ar-condicionado, ventiladores podem ajudar, e certifique-se de se manter hidratado. Pode parecer óbvio, mas o que mais importa para seu cérebro, humor e cognição é quão quente seu corpo está, não a temperatura lá fora.
Os brasileiros estão dispostos a modificar hábitos de consumo para ajudar na luta contra o aquecimento global, mostra uma nova pesquisa Datafolha, divulgada nesta segunda-feira (1º).
Em uma questão em que foram apresentadas possíveis medidas individuais para combater as mudanças climáticas, 100% dos entrevistados afirmaram que adotariam alguma delas.
Quase a totalidade concordaria com atitudes simples, como trocar as lâmpadas de casa por modelos mais econômicos (99%) e reduzir o uso de plástico e embalagens descartáveis (94%). Os índices de aceitação são altos mesmo entre atitudes de custo superior, como colocar painéis solares em casa (89%) ou pagar mais caro por produtos com baixa emissão de carbono (74%) Dois em cada três (63%) investiriam mais por um carro elétrico (63%).
A pesquisa sobre a compreensão e a relação da população com as mudanças climáticas foi realizada presencialmente, com 2.457 pessoas de 16 anos ou mais em 130 municípios pelo Brasil, entre os dias 17 e 22 de junho. A margem de erro é de dois pontos percentuais, com taxa de confiança de 95%.
O levantamento mostra que a maioria das pessoas também aceitaria usar mais o transporte público ou a bicicleta (82%), escolher viagens para lugares mais próximos para evitar usar avião (77%) e até mesmo reduzir o consumo de carne (68%) em prol do meio ambiente.
A queima de combustíveis fósseis, como petróleo, carvão e gás, para produção de energia, transporte e pela indústria é a maior fonte de emissões de gases de efeito estufa no mundo. No Brasil, a principal fonte de emissões é o desmatamento, que tem no setor agropecuário o seu motor mais significativo.
Além disso, o plástico, que é um derivado do petróleo, ainda causa um problema ambiental por si só —especialmente aquele de uso único, como embalagens ou produtos descartáveis. Cerca de 450 milhões de toneladas desse material são descartadas por ano no mundo e apenas 9% é reciclado. Até 2050, as previsões são de que haja mais plástico do peixe nos oceanos.
Os resultados da pesquisa Datafolha apontam, ainda, que 83% dos brasileiros acreditam que atitudes individuais têm um papel importante para resolver problemas ambientais.
Metade (51%) das pessoas diz acreditar que ações individuais contribuem muito para a sustentabilidade e preservação do meio ambiente, e um terço (32%) que contribuem um pouco, enquanto apenas 16% dizem que essas atitudes não contribuem.
O índice de quem acredita na importância de ações individuais para a conservação chega a 93% entre aqueles com ensino superior, 86% para quem tem nível médio e cai a 73% entre os de nível fundamental.
A taxa também cresce, atingindo 88%, na parcela mais jovem dos entrevistados, de 16 a 24 anos. O número fica em 86% para o estrato de 25 a 44 anos, 82% para a faixa etária entre 45 e 59 anos e reduz para 76% na parcela mais velha, de 60 anos ou mais.
Ao mesmo tempo que metade dos brasileiros acreditam que ações individuais são muito significativas para a sustentabilidade, apenas 25% se sentem, pessoalmente, muito responsáveis pelas mudanças climáticas. Outros 51% dizem se sentir um pouco responsáveis e 23%, nada responsáveis. Só 1% não soube opinar.
De modo geral, ações tomadas individualmente pelos cidadãos podem contribuir para reduzir as emissões de gases que aquecem o planeta, como abrir mão de meios de transporte movidos a combustão, fazer adaptações na dieta e consumir produtos de origem sustentável, como recomendado pelo Programa das Nações Unidas para o Meio Ambiente.
Contudo, para mudar significativamente o cenário e as previsões para o futuro do clima, são necessárias grandes transformações em setores econômicos, o que requer medidas contundentes de governos e corporações.
O dado pertence a uma nova pesquisa Datafolha, divulgada nesta segunda-feira (1º), que aponta que apenas 2% dos entrevistados negam a existência das alterações no clima, enquanto 1% não soube responder.
O levantamento foi realizado presencialmente, com 2.457 pessoas de 16 anos ou mais em 130 municípios pelo Brasil, entre os dias 17 e 22 de junho. A margem de erro é de dois pontos percentuais, com taxa de confiança de 95%.
Os resultados mostram que essa percepção quase unânime se repete mesmo considerando diferentes recortes, como gênero, nível de escolaridade e faixa etária —chegando, por exemplo, a 100% de concordância sobre a ocorrência das mudanças climáticas entre os mais jovens, de 16 a 24 anos.
Os índices caem, porém, quando questionados sobre os agentes que provocam essa transformação. São 77% quem acha que as mudanças climáticas são causadas principalmente pelas ações humanas, enquanto 20% defendem que a causa delas é a oscilação natural da temperatura.
Conforme aponta o consenso científico, a crise do clima atual é provocada pelos gases de efeito estufa emitidos pelas atividades humanas, principalmente a queima de combustíveis fósseis e o desmatamento, que aquecem o planeta. Em 2021, uma análise de quase 90 mil artigos científicos mostrou que mais de 99,9% dos pesquisadores do mundo concordam sobre essas causas e efeitos.
Os altos índices gerais de reconhecimento da mudança do clima podem estar relacionados ao aumento da intensidade, frequência e exposição a eventos climáticos extremos. A pesquisa perguntou se nas últimas semanas o lugar onde o entrevistado mora passou por diferentes tipos de fenômenos desta natureza, e 77% disseram que sim.
Entre esses, o número mais expressivo foi o de pessoas que passaram por calor extremo (65%), seguido de chuva intensa ou tempestade (33%), e seca extrema (29%). Enchentes atingiram 20% dos entrevistados e deslizamentos de terra, 7%.
Um quarto dos respondentes (23%) afirmou não ter vivenciado nenhum destes eventos recentemente.
Para Paulo Artaxo, professor de física da USP (Universidade de São Paulo) e membro do IPCC (Painel Intergovernamental sobre Mudanças Climáticas), vinculado à ONU, no mundo inteiro a população está percebendo que o clima mudou para pior, o que é reforçado pela ocorrência de fenômenos extremos.
“As mudanças climáticas se dão em dois níveis. Primeiro, um lento e gradual: degradação ambiental com o aumento lento da temperatura, redução ou aumento lento da precipitação, o aumento do nível do mar que afeta as áreas costeiras e assim por diante”, explica.
“Um segundo componente é a intensificação dos eventos climáticos extremos, que cada vez mais se tornam muito perceptíveis para a população em geral, causando enormes danos na saúde, na economia e na sociedade em geral”.
Marcio Astrini, secretário-executivo do Observatório do Clima, que reúne mais de uma centena de organizações ambientais, concorda.
“As pessoas não precisam mais procurar um relatório científico para se informar. Elas abrem a janela de casa, ligam a televisão e as mudanças climáticas estão acontecendo —não são mais uma previsão, são o presente”, diz. “Isso, obviamente, faz com que as pessoas tenham mais capacidade de compreender o que está acontecendo”.
O Datafolha mostra que a escolaridade é um fator que impacta a percepção dos brasileiros sobre o clima. Entre pessoas com educação de nível fundamental, 67% acreditam que as mudanças climáticas são causadas pela humanidade, 26% dizem que elas fazem parte da natureza e 4%, que não existem, Entre aquelas com ensino superior, os números são, respectivamente, 87%, 13% e 1%.
Astrini afirma que os resultados estão relacionados à falta de acesso à informação qualificada e à abundância de fake news disseminadas sobre o tema.
“Nós vivemos em um mundo em que existe desinformação em larga escala e alguns setores são alvos preferenciais de quem provoca a desinformação. O meio ambiente é um deles”, diz. “Em meio ambiente há muito, muito tempo, a gente enfrenta um verdadeiro batalhão —que vem enfraquecendo, mas ainda existe— de negacionismo, de desinformação”.
Também é entre os que passaram menos tempo na educação formal que está a taxa mais alta de descrença nas previsões da ciência sobre as consequências do aquecimento global. Daqueles que estudaram até o ensino fundamental, 43% dizem acreditar que cientistas e ambientalistas exageram sobre os impactos das mudanças climáticas, enquanto na população geral o índice é de 31%.
O nível mais alto de confiança nos especialistas está entre os mais jovens, com 77% dos que têm entre 16 e 24 anos afirmando que não há exagero a respeito do tema; 21% dizem o contrário.
Já entre aqueles com 60 anos ou mais o patamar de descrença está acima da média nacional, com mais de um terço (36%) concordando com a afirmação de que cientistas e ambientalistas exageram ao tratar dos impactos da crise do clima.
“É esperado que os mais jovens e os com mais acesso à informação mostrem maior concordância com as avaliações científicas. Os mais velhos têm a memória de condições mais estáveis e se formaram em um ambiente onde o tema não estava tão difundido, estudado ou documentado”, avalia Mercedes Bustamante, professora do departamento de ecologia da UnB (Universidade de Brasília).
Cruzando os dados da pesquisa, é possível notar, ainda, que aqueles que relatam não terem vivenciado um evento climático extremo no local onde moram são mais propensos a duvidar do parecer científico sobre os impactos do aquecimento global. Neste grupo, 36% das pessoas acham que os especialistas exageram, 61% acham que não e 3% não souberam responder.
A taxa de descrédito cai para 29% entre aqueles que passaram por alguma situação climática extrema recentemente, enquanto 69% deste estrato acha que não há exagero e 2% não soube responder.
Mais da metade (52%) dos brasileiros acha que as mudanças climáticas são um risco imediato para a população do planeta, enquanto 43% opinam que elas só representarão perigo para quem viverá daqui a muitos anos. Apenas 5% dizem que a crise do clima não representa risco algum.
Os números são da pesquisa Datafolha divulgada nesta segunda-feira (1º), que trata das percepções e opiniões sobre as alterações no clima. O levantamento ouviu 2.457 pessoas de 16 anos ou mais em 130 municípios pelo Brasil, entre os dias 17 e 22 de junho. A margem de erro é de dois pontos percentuais, com taxa de confiança de 95%.
“O percentual de brasileiros que compreende a mudança climática é elevado em comparação a outros países (por exemplo, os Estados Unidos)”, analisa Mercedes Bustamante, professora do departamento de Ecologia da Universidade de Brasília. Ela se refere a outros dados da pesquisa, que mostram que 77% das pessoas dizem acreditar que as mudanças climáticas são provocadas principalmente pelas atividades humanas.
A pesquisadora pondera, porém, que é interessante comparar esses índices com a divisão que aparece quando os entrevistados são questionados sobre os efeitos do aquecimento global. “Isso talvez seja uma indicação [de que há uma] percepção da existência do problema, mas ainda não [percebe-se] como seus mais variados efeitos já estão no dia a dia.”
Estudos mostram que o planeta já aqueceu mais de 1,2°C desde o período pré-industrial (1850-1900), que marca o grande aumento na emissão de carbono pela humanidade, e que fenômenos climáticos extremos, como tempestades e ondas de calor, já estão mais intensos e frequentes.
O Datafolha aponta ainda que, para 58% dos entrevistados, a humanidade não conseguirá agir para reverter os impactos das mudanças climáticas. Menos de um terço da população (31%) acha que será possível retornar a um clima mais ameno, enquanto 7% dizem que isso não faz diferença para a humanidade e o planeta.
O patamar de descrença na capacidade da humanidade de reverter as mudanças climáticas varia de acordo com a escolaridade, sendo mais alto entre aqueles que têm ensino de nível médio (60%). No estrato da população com ensino superior, 36% acreditam na possibilidade dos humanos conseguirem frear a crise climática.
Quase a totalidade diz que concordaria em adotar atitudes simples, como trocar as lâmpadas de casa por modelos mais econômicos (99%) e reduzir o uso de plástico (94%), e os índices de aceitação são altos mesmo diante de uma atitude custosa, como colocar paineis solares em casa (89%) e pagar mais caro por produtos com baixa emissão de carbono (74%) ou para ter um carro elétrico (63%).
Para especialistas, o que pode parecer uma contradição pode ser, na verdade, apenas desesperança com a inação de governantes e grandes corporações –que são os maiores culpados pelas emissões de gases de efeito estufa e, portanto, os principais responsáveis por reduzi-las.
“A ciência mostra caminhos para a resolução da mudança do clima. No entanto, creio que a percepção de que não haverá reversão indica a avaliação da morosidade ou mesmo falta de ações políticas concretas e robustas para abordar as soluções”, afirma Bustamante.
“A falta de ação das indústrias do petróleo e dos governos que são associados a elas, que financiam uma enorme quantidade de governos no mundo todo, está fazendo com que o planeta esteja indo por uma trajetória de aumento de temperatura médio da ordem de 3°C”, afirma o físico Paulo Artaxo, pesquisador da USP.
“Isto pode comprometer muito a qualidade de vida das próximas gerações, e isso não é para o final do século, já é para as próximas décadas”, acrescenta ele.
Para Marcio Astrini, secretário-executivo do Observatório do Clima, rede que reúne mais de uma centena de organizações ambientais, o impacto dessa desesperança da população em reverter as mudanças climáticas pode ter um efeito nocivo, de diminuir esforços nesse sentido.
“Quando o ser humano pensa, ‘olha, já que não tem jeito, então para que que eu vou me esforçar? Para resolver algo que não tem solução?’. Isso, inclusive, se reflete no voto, na escolha dos governantes que vão gerenciar a máquina estatal, que é quem vai resolver o problema”, explica.
“Isso desencadeia um problema em cima do outro, porque é uma imobilização. E quanto mais passa o tempo, mais estreita vai ficar a janela para termos alguma esperança de solução”, diz Astrini.
Talvez o fator mais determinante para essa opinião unânime decorra da repetição de eventos extremos, como secas incendiárias, ondas de calor mortíferas e tempestades avassaladoras. Em 2020 o fogo já devastara o pantanal, e o Sul fora açoitado por sucessivas chuvas torrenciais no segundo semestre de 2023.
Com a reincidência e o porte desses desastres, muita gente passou a ter experiência direta com flagelos. Ao Datafolha, 65% relataram ter enfrentado calor extremo, assim como 33% apontaram chuva intensa ou tempestade e 29%, seca extrema. Só um quarto (23%) afirmou não ter vivido nenhum desses eventos.
Eram favas contadas que a maioria dos 2.457 brasileiros entrevistados pelo Datafolha, de 17 a 22 de junho, acusaria os golpes seguidos do aquecimento global, diante da avalanche de imagens dantescas a cada noite na TV. Poucos ainda negam a mudança climática, mas isso não significa que o negacionismo morreu.
Só 77% dos ouvidos atribuem as alterações aos gases do efeito estufa produzidos pela atividade humana, como a queima de combustíveis fósseis (derivados de petróleo, carvão e gás natural), o desmatamento e a agropecuária. Um contingente expressivo de 20% prefere enxergar causas naturais para a crise.
Menos gente ainda, 53%, diz acreditar que o fim da normalidade seja um risco imediato para a população da Terra. Outros 43% afirmam que o impacto afetará apenas as gerações futuras.
Quase um terço dos entrevistados (31%) avalia haver exagero de pesquisadores e ambientalistas quanto a impactos da mudança climática. Esse grupo de céticos alcança 43% entre pessoas que têm nível fundamental de escolaridade.
O dado da pesquisa que causa mais alarme aponta um excesso de fatalismo: 58% dos brasileiros opinam que a humanidade será incapaz de reverter a crise do clima. Meros 31% consideram possível manter o clima sob relativo controle, e 7% dizem que não faz diferença para a humanidade ou a natureza.
Esses bolsões remanescentes de ceticismo climático refletem o sucesso parcial da propaganda negacionista em sua tática de semear dúvidas múltiplas e variadas. Quando se torna impossível contradizer a existência do aquecimento global, dado o acúmulo de evidências e medições, lança-se suspeita sobre a contribuição humana para o fenômeno.
No mesmo diapasão, argumenta-se que a sociedade humana não tem meios para contra-arrestar fenômenos em escala planetária. Em paralelo, assegura-se que os impactos não serão tão graves assim, quem sabe até benéficos.
E pensar que há supostos cientistas dispostos a propagar tais fake news, em realidade pesquisadores argentários, aposentados ou desacreditados. Essa traição à ciência tem consequências, porém.
Embora tenha muito a perder com o desvario climático, a banda atrasada do agronegócio aplaude os mercadores de dúvidas e ajuda a eleger parlamentares, sobretudo no centrão, que tanto retrocesso impuseram à pauta ambiental no governo Bolsonaro (PL) e ainda dão suas mordidas sob a ambivalência de Lula (PT).
Só a ciência, sem a política, não vai conseguir produzir as soluções que o mundo precisa para combater a crise climática.
Quem diz é Michael Sandel, professor de filosofia política da Universidade Harvard e autor de diversos livros —o último publicado no Brasil é “O Descontentamento da Democracia” (ed. Civilização Brasileira).
A frase pode até parecer um truísmo, mas resume o cerne das críticas de Sandel às democracias contemporâneas: quando a política é dominada pelo discurso tecnocrático, os cidadãos acabam sem voz e sem meios de participar das decisões que afetam suas vidas.
Em “O Descontentamento da Democracia”, ele diz que a culpa da ascensão do autoritarismo pelo mundo é do chamado neoliberalismo, que promoveu o fortalecimento do setor financeiro e a desregulação dos mercados.
Para Sandel, essas políticas foram levadas adiante por tecnocratas de direita e esquerda que alienaram cidadãos das decisões econômicas, amparados por um discurso de meritocracia, gerando uma reação de ressentimento contra as elites e ceticismo quanto à democracia.
Por isso, diz, é importante não repetir o mesmo erro com a política climática. A ciência é, sim, crucial para embasar as decisões, mas é preciso participação democrática —e as lideranças não podem usar o discurso científico como forma de escapar de suas responsabilidades.
Sandel participou recentemente do ciclo de palestras online Clima e Sociedade, promovido pela UFSM (Universidade Federal de Santa Maria), em que conversou com lideranças comunitárias que estão no front de combate aos efeitos das enchentes que atingiram o Rio Grande do Sul.
Em entrevista à Folha, ele explica como os pontos levantados em seu livro se aplicam ao debate climático, avalia a atuação de instituições multilaterais nesse campo e defende que se evite o discurso apocalíptico.
Em vez de reforçar um sentimento de solidariedade, crises como a pandemia parecem ter explicitado divisões —e democracias como os Estados Unidos continuam tão polarizadas quanto antes. O mundo superestima a capacidade dessas crises de gerar solidariedade mútua?
A pandemia foi um ótimo teste. No começo da crise de saúde, com frequência ouvíamos que essa emergência iria nos unir, mostrando que somos igualmente vulneráveis, apesar das desigualdades econômicas. Quem podia trabalhar de casa logo percebeu o quanto dependemos do trabalho de pessoas que são ignoradas.
Poderia ter sido a hora para debater melhores salários e reconhecimento para os trabalhadores essenciais. Mas isso não ocorreu. A pandemia retrocedeu e a gratidão a eles também. Foi uma oportunidade perdida, a pandemia não nos levou a uma transformação social ou espiritual.
Para manter o senso de comunidade que crises como as enchentes no Sul despertam, é necessário criar instituições e espaços públicos sólidos, além formas de organização. Pressionar os governos por recursos é importante, mas é preciso construir instituições na sociedade civil, estabelecer um diálogo contínuo para que todos entendam que dividimos uma vida comum.
Você coloca a economia no centro da sua análise da crise das democracias liberais, em detrimento de uma análise mais cultural, que hoje parece mais popular no debate público. Por que essa abordagem econômica é mais adequada?
Em “O Descontentamento da Democracia”, escrevo sobre o que chamo de economia política da cidadania. Nas últimas décadas, erramos ao pressupor que o único propósito da economia é promover o consumo. E que, portanto, nosso foco principal deveria ser o crescimento do PIB e a distribuição da riqueza.
Tudo isso importa, é claro, mas não são as únicas questões que devemos levar em conta. É preciso se perguntar quais arranjos econômicos são favoráveis à participação democrática.
Democracia não é só ir votar. Democracia é criar condições econômicas e sociais que possibilitem às pessoas deliberar como iguais [sobre seu destino], moldando as forças que as governam.
Quando as pessoas não têm voz, elas se sentem excluídas, raivosas, ressentidas —e vão se conectar a políticos demagogos que canalizam essa alienação. Isso é o que começa a explicar o que está havendo, nos últimos anos, tanto nos EUA quanto no Brasil.
Sou contra uma separação tão dura entre uma análise econômica e outra cultural sobre por que cidadãos têm apoiado líderes autoritários pelo mundo.
Nos últimos anos, a divisão entre vencedores e derrotados se aprofundou, envenenando a política. Isso tem em partes a ver com a desigualdade, mas há também uma mudança de atitude em relação ao sucesso individual.
Quem está no topo acha que os lucros que recebeu do mercado são a medida de seus méritos —e que quem ficou para trás, por consequência, também mereceria o próprio destino.
Isso ajuda a explicar a política da raiva e do ressentimento. E também o crescimento do populismo autoritário de direita. Muitos da classe trabalhadora acham que as elites os olham de cima para baixo, com especial desprezo contra aqueles que não receberam educação universitária.
Agora, quanto dessa análise é econômica e quanto é cultural? São ambos os casos. É econômica porque mostra como a economia pode deteriorar a democracia participativa. E porque foca no papel do crescimento da desigualdade. Mas também é cultural, porque identifico esses elementos de ressentimento.
É preciso atar as duas pontas, resolver as desigualdades e lidar com a sensação de não ter voz, a raiva de tantos da classe trabalhadora.
Sua análise está centrada na globalização e nas chamadas políticas neoliberais. Qual o impacto disso no debate político sobre a mudança climática?
A política da mudança climática é um exemplo de como algo focado nas elites rapidamente vira um discurso tecnocrático quanto ao meio ambiente, que pode reforçar a polarização.
Há um jeito de organizar a economia e conduzir as políticas públicas que leva os cidadãos a se sentir sem voz. É uma política que trata as questões econômicas e ambientais como algo técnico, que só diz respeito aos especialistas.
Vimos esse discurso tecnocrático durante a pandemia, quando representantes das elites diziam que só estavam “seguindo a ciência”, o que é um jeito de escapar das responsabilidades.
Claro que é importante seguir a ciência no meio de uma pandemia ou da mudança climática —mas é um erro pressupor que a ciência sozinha pode realizar as avaliações políticas necessárias.
Por exemplo, durante a pandemia, a ciência não podia resolver se deveríamos fechar as escolas e por quanto tempo. Esse era um julgamento político, que teve que ser debatido pelos cidadãos dentro do processo democrático —e quem tomou as decisões teria que assumir responsabilidade por elas.
Não adianta só dizer que se está seguindo a ciência. No caso da política climática, a ciência precisa informar as decisões que vamos tomar, mas essas medidas precisam ser debatidas entre as pessoas implicadas nelas. Pois isso envolve negociações, questões distributivas, um debate sobre quem vai pagar o preço da transição para a economia verde… E por aí vai.
O que nos trouxe a esse momento tão polarizado é a insistência das elites políticas de que são especialistas ou que estão amparadas por especialistas. Com isso, fica implícito que quem discorda ou está mal informado ou é ignorante. E que, portanto, essas pessoas não estariam qualificadas a ter voz.
É o mesmo que ocorreu com a dignidade da classe trabalhadora, deteriorada pela financeirização da economia, a terceirização do trabalho, tudo em nome dos especialistas que diziam que isso seria bom para todos.
Se repetimos essa postura tecnocrática no combate à mudança climática, teremos outra vez as elites olhando os cidadãos de cima, dizendo que estão só seguindo a ciência.
A mudança climática é uma crise que requer ação global. Mas, no seu livro, você mostra ceticismo quanto às organizações multilaterais. Como elas deveriam funcionar?
A mudança climática requer cooperação global, sem dúvidas. E isso significa que precisamos de instituições multilaterais para conceber e implementar políticas, a fim de proteger o planeta e promover a transição para a economia verde.
As instituições globais hoje operam como instituições tecnocráticas, sem legitimidade ou participação democrática. E esse é um problema com o qual teremos que lidar.
A Europa já estava lidando com isso antes de a crise climática se tornar algo tão central. Mesmo esse bloco, onde a maioria dos países têm tradição democrática, tem sido associado aos burocratas de Bruxelas. Cidadãos nacionais se ressentem de determinações vindas desses burocratas e acham que não têm voz.
O mesmo vale para as instituições que serão necessárias para lidarmos com a crise climática. Precisamos de plataformas para um discurso público global, que possa envolver os cidadãos comuns na formulação de políticas que nos levarão a uma economia verde.
Se for algo puramente tecnocrático, mesmo o grupo de especialistas melhor administrado não vai ser capaz de conquistar legitimidade democrática e implementar qualquer política. Em resumo, não sou cético quanto às instituições multilaterais, apenas quero enfatizar a necessidade de participação democrática.
Seu principal ponto é que as políticas neoliberais teriam levado eleitores para a extrema direita. Você aponta que o presidente Joe Biden foi o primeiro a romper com essas diretrizes econômicas. No entanto, Donald Trump tem grandes chances de ser eleito. O que houve?
Um novo mandato de Trump aumentaria os riscos que a democracia americana enfrenta. Sim, Joe Biden rompeu com o mercado neoliberal que produziu a polarização política.
Ele falou sobre tentar restaurar a dignidade do trabalho, inclusive para quem não tem formação universitária.
Biden revitalizou as políticas antitruste, não só com objetivo de diminuir preços ao consumidor, mas também de responsabilizar o poder econômico, especialmente no caso das “big techs”. Também levou o Congresso a implementar investimentos públicos em infraestrutura que não eram vistos há décadas.
Por que ele não está colhendo dividendos políticos disso? Ele não foi capaz de articular essas medidas em uma nova visão de governo, não conseguiu explicar como todas essas políticas, se vistas em conjunto, podem renovar a cidadania democrática. E que, ao restaurar a dignidade do trabalho, as pessoas podem ter voz na política.
Uma liderança não depende só de implementar boas políticas, mas de oferecer uma visão que seja ao mesmo tempo econômica, política e moral.
RAIO-X
Michael J. Sandel, 71
É professor de filosofia política na Universidade Harvard, nos EUA, com obras que já foram traduzidas para mais de 30 línguas. Em livros como “O Descontentamento da Democracia” e “A Tirania do Mérito”, escreve sobre ética, economia e democracia, entre outros temas. Seu curso intitulado Justiça foi o primeiro de Harvard a ser disponibilizado gratuitamente online —e já foi visto por dezenas de milhões de pessoas.
Hundreds of looming projects will force communities to weight the climate claims and environmental risks of capturing, moving, and storing carbon dioxide.
James Temple
June 12, 2024
Pump jacks and pipelines clutter the Elk Hills oil field of California, a scrubby stretch of land in the southern Central Valley that rests above one of the nation’s richest deposits of fossil fuels.
Oil production has been steadily declining in the state for decades, as tech jobs have boomed and legislators have enacted rigorous environmental and climate rules. Companies, towns, and residents across Kern County, where the poverty rate hovers around 18%, have grown increasingly desperate for new economic opportunities.
Late last year, California Resources Corporation (CRC), one of the state’s largest oil and gas producers, secured draft permits from the US Environmental Protection Agency to develop a new type of well in the oil field, which it asserts would provide just that. If the company gets final approval from regulators, it intends to drill a series of boreholes down to a sprawling sedimentary formation roughly 6,000 feet below the surface, where it will inject tens of millions of metric tons of carbon dioxide to store it away forever.
They’re likely to become California’s first set of what are known as Class VI wells, designed specifically for sequestering the planet-warming greenhouse gas. But many, many similar carbon storage projects are on the way across the state, the US, and the world—a trend driven by growing government subsidies, looming national climate targets, and declining revenue and growth in traditional oil and gas activities.
Since the start of 2022, companies like CRC have submitted nearly 200 applications in the US alone to develop wells of this new type. That offers one of the clearest signs yet that capturing the carbon dioxide pollution from industrial and energy operations instead of releasing it into the atmosphere is about to become a much bigger business.
Proponents hope it’s the start of a sort of oil boom in reverse, kick-starting a process through which the world will eventually bury more greenhouse gas than it adds to the atmosphere. They argue that embracing carbon capture and storage (CCS) is essential to any plan to rapidly slash emissions. This is, in part, because retrofitting the world’s massive existing infrastructure with carbon dioxide–scrubbing equipment could be faster and easier than rebuilding every power plant and factory. CCS can be a particularly helpful way to cut emissions in certain heavy industries, like cement, fertilizer, and paper and pulp production, where we don’t have scalable, affordable ways of producing crucial goods without releasing carbon dioxide.
“In the right context, CCS saves time, it saves money, and it lowers risks,” says Julio Friedmann, chief scientist at Carbon Direct and previously the principal deputy assistant secretary for the Department of Energy’s Office of Fossil Energy.
But opponents insist these efforts will prolong the life of fossil-fuel plants, allow air and water pollution to continue, and create new health and environmental risks that could disproportionately harm disadvantaged communities surrounding the projects, including those near the Elk Hills oil field.
“It’s the oil majors that are proposing and funding a lot of these projects,” says Catherine Garoupa, executive director of the Central Valley Air Quality Coalition, which has tracked a surge of applications for carbon storage projects throughout the district. “They see it as a way of extending business as usual and allowing them to be carbon neutral on paper while still doing the same old dirty practices.”
A slow start
The US federal government began overseeing injection wells in the 1970s. A growing number of companies had begun injecting waste underground, sparking a torrent of water pollution lawsuits and the passage of several major laws designed to ensure clean drinking water. The EPA developed standards and rules for a variety of wells and waste types, including deep Class I wells for hazardous or even radioactive refuse and shallower Class V wells for non-hazardous fluids.
In 2010, amid federal efforts to create incentives for industries to capture more carbon dioxide, the agency added Class VI wells for CO2 sequestration. To qualify, a proposed well site must have the appropriate geology, with a deep reservoir of porous rock that can accommodate carbon dioxide molecules sitting below a layer of nonporous “cap rock” like shale. The reservoir also needs to sit well below any groundwater aquifers, so that it won’t contaminate drinking water supplies, and it must be far enough from fault lines to reduce the chances that earthquakes might crack open pathways for the greenhouse gas to escape.
But there’s been a flurry of proposals since—both to the EPA and to the three states that have secured permission to authorize such wells themselves, which include North Dakota, Wyoming, and Louisiana. The Clean Air Task Force, a Boston-based energy policy think tank keeping track of such projects, says there are now more than 200 pending applications.
What changed is the federal incentives. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 dramatically boosted the tax credits available for permanently storing carbon dioxide in geological formations, bumping it up from $50 a ton to $85 when it’s captured from industrial and power plants. The credit rose from $50 to $180 a ton when the greenhouse gas is sourced from direct-air-capture facilities, a different technology that sucks greenhouse gas out of the air. Tax credits allow companies to directly reduce their federal tax obligations, which can cover the added expense of CCS across a growing number of sectors.
CRC became an independent company in 2014, when Occidental Petroleum, one of the world’s largest oil and gas producers, spun it off along with many of its California assets. But the new company quickly ran into financial difficulties, filing for bankruptcy protection in 2020 amid plummeting energy demand during the early stages of the covid-19 pandemic. It emerged several months later, after restructuring its debt, converting loans into equity, and raising new lines of credit.
The following year, CRC created a carbon management subsidiary, Carbon TerraVault, seizing an emerging opportunity to develop a new business around putting carbon dioxide back underground, whether for itself or for customers. The company says it was also motivated by the chance to “help advance the energy transition and curb rising global temperatures at 1.5 °C.”
CRC didn’t respond to inquiries from MIT Technology Review.
In its EPA application the company, based in Long Beach, California, says that hundreds of thousands of tons of carbon dioxide would initially be captured each year from a gas treatment facility in the Elk Hills area as well as a planned plant designed to produce hydrogen from natural gas. The gas is purified and compressed before it’s pumped underground.
The company says the four wells for which it has secured draft permits could store nearly 1.5 million tons of carbon dioxide per year from those and other facilities, with a total capacity of 38 million tons over 26 years. CRC says the projects will create local jobs and help the state meet its pressing climate targets.
“We are committed to supporting the state in reaching carbon neutrality and developing a more sustainable future for all Californians,” Francisco Leon, chief executive of CRC, said of the draft EPA decision in a statement.
Those wells, however, are just the start of the company’s carbon management plans: Carbon TerraVault has applied to develop 27 additional wells for carbon storage across the state, including two more at Elk Hills, according to the EPA’s permit tracker. If those are all approved and developed, it would transform the subsidiary into a major player in the emerging business of carbon storage—and set it up for a windfall in federal tax credits.
Carbon sequestration projects can qualify for 12 years of US subsidies. If Carbon TerraVault injects half a million tons of carbon dioxide into each of the 31 wells it has applied for over that time period, the projects could secure tax credits worth more than $15.8 billion.
That figure doesn’t take inflation into account and assumes the company meets the most stringent requirements of the law and sources all the carbon dioxide from industrial facilities and power plants. The number could rise significantly if the company injects more than that amount into wells, or if a significant share of the carbon dioxide is sourced through direct air capture.
Chevron, BP, ExxonMobil, and Archer Daniels Midland, a major producer of ethanol, have also submitted Class VI well applications to the EPA and could be poised to secure significant IRA subsidies as well.
To be sure, it takes years to secure regulatory permits, and not every proposed project will move forward in the end. The companies involved will still need to raise financing, add carbon capture equipment to polluting facilities, and in many cases build out carbon dioxide pipelines that require separate approvals. But the increased IRA tax credits could drive as much as 250 million metric tons of additional annual storage or use of carbon dioxide in the US by 2035, according to the latest figures from the Princeton-led REPEAT Project.
“It’s a gold rush,” Garoupa says. “It’s being shoved down our throats as ‘Oh, it’s for climate goals.’” But if we’re “not doing it judiciously and really trying to achieve real emissions reductions first,” she adds, it’s merely a distraction from the other types of climate action needed to prevent dangerous levels of warming.
Carbon accounting
Even if CCS can help drive down emissions in the aggregate, the net climate benefits from any given project will depend on a variety of factors, including how well it’s developed and run—and what other changes it brings about throughout complex, interconnected energy systems over time.
Notably, adding carbon capture equipment to a plant doesn’t trap all the climate pollution. Project developers are generally aiming for around 90%. So if you build a new project with CCS, you’ve increased emissions, not cut them, relative to the status quo.
In addition, the carbon capture process requires a lot of power to run, which may significantly increase emissions of greenhouse gas and other pollutants elsewhere by, for example, drawing on additional generation from natural-gas plants on the grid. Plus, the added tax incentives may make it profitable for a company to continue operating a fossil-fuel plant that it would otherwise have shut down or to run the facilities more hours of the day to generate more carbon dioxide to bury.
All the uncaptured emissions associated with those changes can reduce, if not wipe out, any carbon benefits from incorporating CCS, says Danny Cullenward, a senior fellow with the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania.
But none of that matters as far as the carbon storage subsidies are concerned. Businesses could even use the savings to expand their traditional oil and gas operations, he says.
“It’s not about the net climate impact—it’s about the gross tons you stick under ground,” Cullenward says of the tax credits.
A study last year raised a warning about how that could play out in the years to come, noting that the IRA may require the US to provide hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars in tax credits for power plants that add CCS. Under the scenarios explored, those projects could collectively deliver emissions reductions of as much as 24% or increases as high as 82%. The difference depends largely on how much the incentives alter energy production and the degree to which they extend the life of coal and natural-gas plants.
Coauthor Emily Grubert, an associate professor at Notre Dame and a former deputy assistant secretary at the Department of Energy, stressed that regulators must carefully consider these complex, cascading emissions impacts when weighing whether to approve such proposals.
“Not taking this seriously risks potentially trillions of dollars and billions of tonnes of [greenhouse-gas] emissions, not to mention the trust and goodwill of the American public, which is reasonably skeptical of these potentially critically important technologies,” she wrote in an op-ed in the industry outlet Utility Dive.
Global goals
Other nations and regions are also accelerating efforts to capture and store carbon as part of their broader efforts to lower emissions and combat climate change. The EU, which has dedicated tens of billions of euros to accelerating the development of CCS, is working to develop the capacity to store 50 million tons of carbon dioxide per year by 2030, according to the Global CCS Institute’s 2023 industry report.
Likewise, Japan hopes to sequester 240 million tons annually by 2050, while Saudi Arabia is aiming for 44 million tons by 2035. The industry trade group said there were 41 CCS projects in operation around the world at the time, with another 351 under development.
A handful of US facilities have been capturing carbon dioxide for decades for a variety of uses, including processing or producing natural gas, ammonia, and soda ash, which is used in soaps, cosmetics, baking soda, and other goods.
But Ben Grove, carbon storage manager at the Clean Air Task Force, says the increased subsidies in the IRA made CCS economical for many industry segments in the US, including: chemicals, petrochemicals, hydrogen, cement, oil, gas and ethanol refineries, and steel, at least on the low end of the estimated cost ranges.
In many cases, the available subsidies still won’t fully cover the added cost of CCS in power plants and certain other industrial facilities. But the broader hope is that these federal programs will help companies scale up and optimize these processes over time, driving down the cost of CCS and making it feasible for more sectors, Grove says.
Still other sources could include renewable fuels plants, which may mean biofuel facilities, steam generators, and a proposed direct-air-capture plant that would be developed by the carbon-removal startup Avnos, according to the EPA filing. Carbon TerraVault is part of a consortium, which includes Avnos, Climeworks, Southern California Gas Company, and others, that has proposed developing a direct-air-capture hub in Kern County, where the Elk Hills field is located. Last year, the Department of Energy awarded the so-called California DAC Hub nearly $12 million to conduct engineering design studies for direct-air-capture facilities.
CCS may be a helpful tool for heavy industries that are really hard to clean up, but that’s largely not what CRC has proposed, says Natalia Ospina, legal director at the Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment, an environmental-justice advocacy organization in Delano, California.
“The initial source will be the Elk Hills oil field itself and the plant that refines gas in the first place,” she says. “That is just going to allow them to extend the life of the oil and gas industry in Kern County, which goes against all the evidence in front of us in terms of how we should be addressing the climate crisis.”
Natalia Ospina, legal director at the Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment.
Critics of the project also fear that some of these facilities will continue producing other types of pollution, like volatile organic compounds and fine particulate matter, in a region that’s already heavily polluted. Some analyses show that adding a carbon capture process reduces those other pollutants in certain cases. But Ospina argues that oil and gas companies can’t be trusted to operate such projects in ways that reduce pollution to the levels necessary to protect neighboring communities.
‘You need it’
Still, a variety of studies, from the state level to the global, conclude that CCS may play an essential role in cutting greenhouse-gas emissions fast enough to moderate the global dangers of climate change.
California is banking heavily on capturing carbon from plants or removing it from the air through various means to meet its 2045 climate neutrality goal, aiming for 20 million metric tons by 2030 and 100 million by midcentury. The Air Resources Board, the state’s main climate regulator, declared that “there is no path to carbon neutrality without carbon removal and sequestration.”
Recentreports from the UN’s climate panel have also stressed that carbon capture could be a “critical mitigation option” for cutting emissions from cement and chemical production. The body’s modeling study scenarios that limit global warming to 1.5 °C over preindustrial levels rely on significant levels of CCS, including tens to hundreds of billions of tons of carbon dioxide captured this century from plants that use biomatter to produce heat and electricity—a process known as BECCS.
Meeting global climate targets without carbon capture would require shutting down about a quarter of the world’s fossil-fuel plants before they’ve reached the typical 50-year life span, the International Energy Agency notes. That’s an expensive proposition, and one that owners, investors, industry trade groups, and even nations will fiercely resist.
“Everyone keeps coming to the same conclusion, which is that you need it,” Friedmann says.
Lorelei Oviatt, director of the Kern County Planning and Natural Resources Department, declined to express an opinion about CRC’s Elk Hills project while local regulators are reviewing it. But she strongly supports the development of CCS projects in general, describing it as a way to help her region restore lost tax revenue and jobs as “the state puts the area’s oil companies out of business” through tighter regulations.
County officials have proposed the development of a more than 4,000-acre carbon management park, which could include hydrogen, steel, and biomass facilities with carbon-capture components. An economic analysis last year found that the campus and related activities could create more than 22,000 jobs, and generate more than $88 million in sales and property taxes for the economically challenged county and cities, under a high-end scenario.
Oviatt adds that embracing carbon capture may also allow the region to avoid the “stranded asset” problem, in which major employers are forced to shut down expensive power plants, refineries, and extraction wells that could otherwise continue operating for years to decades.
“We’re the largest producer of oil in California and seventh in the country; we have trillions and trillions of dollars in infrastructure,” she says. “The idea that all of that should just be abandoned does not seem like a thoughtful way to design an economy.”
In a 2022 letter to the EPA, the Center for Biological Diversity raised the possibility that the sequestered carbon dioxide could leak out of wells or pipelines, contributing to climate change and harming local residents.
These concerns are not without foundation.
In February 2020, Denbury Enterprises’ Delta pipeline, which stretches more than 100 miles between Mississippi and Louisiana, ruptured and released more than 30,000 barrels’ worth of compressed, liquid CO2 gas near the town of Satartia, Mississippi.
The leak forced hundreds of people to evacuate their homes and sent dozens to local hospitals, some struggling to breathe and others unconscious and foaming at the mouth, as the Huffington Postdetailed in an investigative piece. Some vehicles stopped running as well: the carbon dioxide in air displaced oxygen, which is essential to the combustion in combustion engines.
There have also been repeated carbon dioxide releases over the last two decades at an enhanced oil recovery project at the Salt Creek oil field in Wyoming. Starting in the late 1800s, a variety of operators have drilled, abandoned, sealed, and resealed thousands of wells at the site, with varying degrees of quality, reliability, and documentation, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council. A sustained leak in 2004 emitted 12,000 cubic feet of the gas per day, on average, while a 2016 release of carbon dioxide and methane forced a school near the field to relocate its classes for the remainder of the year.
Some fear that similar issues could arise at Elk Hills, which could become the nation’s first carbon sequestration project developed in a depleted oil field. Companies have drilled and operated thousands of wells over decades at the site, many of which have sat idle and unplugged for years, according to a 2020 investigation by the Los Angeles Times and the Center for Public Integrity.
Ospina argues that CRC and county officials are asking the residents of Kern County to act as test subjects for unproven and possibly dangerous CCS use cases, compounding the health risks facing a region that is already exposed to too many.
Whether the Elk Hills project moves forward or not, the looming carbon storage boom will soon force many other areas to wrestle with similar issues. What remains to be seen is whether companies and regulators can adequately address community fears and demonstrate that the climate benefits promised in modeling studies will be delivered in reality.
Update: This story was updated to remove a photo that was not of the Elk Hills oil field and had been improperly captioned.
Researchers measuring the effect of Hurricane Sandy on children in utero at the time reported: ‘Our findings are extremely alarming.’ Illustration: Ngadi Smart/The Guardian
Are growing rates of anxiety, depression, ADHD, PTSD, Alzheimer’s and motor neurone disease related to rising temperatures and other extreme environmental changes?
In late October 2012, a category 3 hurricane howled into New York City with a force that would etch its name into the annals of history. Superstorm Sandy transformed the city, inflicting more than $60bn in damage, killing dozens, and forcing 6,500 patients to be evacuated from hospitals and nursing homes. Yet in the case of one cognitive neuroscientist, the storm presented, darkly, an opportunity.
Yoko Nomura had found herself at the centre of a natural experiment. Prior to the hurricane’s unexpected visit, Nomura – who teaches in the psychology department at Queens College, CUNY, as well as in the psychiatry department of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai – had meticulously assembled a research cohort of hundreds of expectant New York mothers. Her investigation, the Stress in Pregnancy study, had aimed since 2009 to explore the potential imprint of prenatal stress on the unborn. Drawing on the evolving field of epigenetics, Nomura had sought to understand the ways in which environmental stressors could spur changes in gene expression, the likes of which were already known to influence the risk of specific childhood neurobehavioural outcomes such as autism, schizophrenia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
The storm, however, lent her research a new, urgent question. A subset of Nomura’s cohort of expectant women had been pregnant during Sandy. She wanted to know if the prenatal stress of living through a hurricane – of experiencing something so uniquely catastrophic – acted differentially on the children these mothers were carrying, relative to those children who were born before or conceived after the storm.
More than a decade later, she has her answer. The conclusions reveal a startling disparity: children who were in utero during Sandy bear an inordinately high risk of psychiatric conditions today. For example, girls who were exposed to Sandy prenatally experienced a 20-fold increase in anxiety and a 30-fold increase in depression later in life compared with girls who were not exposed. Boys had 60-fold and 20-fold increased risks of ADHD and conduct disorder, respectively. Children expressed symptoms of the conditions as early as preschool.
Flooding in Lindenhurst, New York, in October 2012, after Hurricane Sandy struck. Photograph: Bruce Bennett/Getty Images
“Our findings are extremely alarming,” the researchers wrote in a 2022 study summarising their initial results. It is not the type of sentence one usually finds in the otherwise measured discussion sections of academic papers.
Yet Nomura and her colleagues’ research also offers a representative page in a new story of the climate crisis: a story that says a changing climate doesn’t just shape the environment in which we live. Rather, the climate crisis spurs visceral and tangible transformations in our very brains. As the world undergoes dramatic environmental shifts, so too does our neurological landscape. Fossil-fuel-induced changes – from rising temperatures to extreme weather to heightened levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide – are altering our brain health, influencing everything from memory and executive function to language, the formation of identity, and even the structure of the brain. The weight of nature is heavy, and it presses inward.
Evidence comes from a variety of fields. Psychologists and behavioural economists have illustrated the ways in which temperature spikes drive surges in everything from domestic violence to online hate speech. Cognitive neuroscientists have charted the routes by which extreme heat and surging CO2 levels impair decision-making, diminish problem-solving abilities, and short-circuit our capacity to learn. Vectors of brain disease, such as ticks and mosquitoes, are seeing their habitable ranges expand as the world warms. And as researchers like Nomura have shown, you don’t need to go to war to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder: the violence of a hurricane or wildfire is enough. It appears that, due to epigenetic inheritance, you don’t even need to have been born yet.
When it comes to the health effects of the climate crisis, says Burcin Ikiz, a neuroscientist at the mental-health philanthropy organisation the Baszucki Group, “we know what happens in the cardiovascular system; we know what happens in the respiratory system; we know what happens in the immune system. But there’s almost nothing on neurology and brain health.” Ikiz, like Nomura, is one of a growing cadre of neuroscientists seeking to connect the dots between environmental and neurological wellness.
As a cohesive effort, the field – which we might call climatological neuroepidemiology – is in its infancy. But many of the effects catalogued by such researchers feel intuitive.
Residents evacuate Evia, Greece, in 2021, after wildfires hit the island. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images
Perhaps you’ve noticed that when the weather gets a bit muggier, your thinking does the same. That’s no coincidence; it’s a nearly universal phenomenon. During a summer 2016 heatwave in Boston, Harvard epidemiologists showed that college students living in dorms without air conditioning performed standard cognitive tests more slowly than those living with it. In January of this year, Chinese economists noted that students who took mathematics tests on days above 32C looked as if they had lost the equivalent of a quarter of a year of education, relative to test days in the range 22–24C. Researchers estimate that the disparate effects of hot school days – disproportionately felt in poorer school districts without access to air conditioning and home to higher concentrations of non-white students – account for something on the order of 5% of the racial achievement gap in the US.
Cognitive performance is the tip of the melting iceberg. You may have also noticed, for example, your own feelings of aggression on hotter days. You and everyone else – and animals, too. Black widow spiders tend more quickly toward sibling cannibalism in the heat. Rhesus monkeys start more fights with one another. Baseball pitchers are more likely to intentionally hit batters with their pitches as temperatures rise. US Postal Service workers experience roughly 5% more incidents of harassment and discrimination on days above 32C, relative to temperate days.
Neuroscientists point to a variety of routes through which extreme heat can act on behaviour. In 2015, for example, Korean researchers found that heat stress triggers inflammation in the hippocampus of mice, a brain region essential for memory storage. Extreme heat also diminishes neuronal communication in zebrafish, a model organism regularly studied by scientists interested in brain function. In human beings, functional connections between brain areas appear more randomised at higher temperatures. In other words, heat limits the degree to which brain activity appears coordinated. On the aggression front, Finnish researchers noted in 2017 that high temperatures appear to suppress serotonin function, more so among people who had committed violent crimes. For these people, blood levels of a serotonin transporter protein, highly correlated with outside temperatures, could account for nearly 40% of the fluctuations in the country’s rate of violent crime.
Prolonged exposure to heat can activate a multitude of biochemical pathways associated with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Illustration: Ngadi Smart/The Guardian
“We’re not thinking about any of this,” says Ikiz. “We’re not getting our healthcare systems ready. We’re not doing anything in terms of prevention or protections.”
Ikiz is particularly concerned with the neurodegenerative effects of the climate crisis. In part, that’s because prolonged exposure to heat in its own right – including an increase of a single degree centigrade – can activate a multitude of biochemical pathways associated with neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Air pollution does the same thing. (In rats, such effects are seen after exposure to extreme heat for a mere 15 minutes a day for one week.) Thus, with continued burning of fossil fuels, whether through direct or indirect effects, comes more dementia. Researchers have already illustrated the manners in which dementia-related hospitalisations rise with temperature. Warmer weather worsens the symptoms of neurodegeneration as well.
Prior to her move to philanthropy, Ikiz’s neuroscience research largely focused on the mechanisms underlying the neurodegenerative disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease or motor neurone disease). Today, she points to research suggesting that blue-green algae, blooming with ever-increasing frequency under a changing global climate, releases a potent neurotoxin that offers one of the most compelling causal explanations for the incidence of non-genetic ALS. Epidemiologists have, for example, identified clusters of ALS cases downwind of freshwater lakes prone to blue-green algae blooms.
A supermarket in Long Beach is stripped of water bottles in preparation for Hurricane Sandy. Photograph: Mike Stobe/Getty Images
It’s this flavour of research that worries her the most. Children constitute one of the populations most vulnerable to these risk factors, since such exposures appear to compound cumulatively over one’s life, and neurodegenerative diseases tend to manifest in the later years. “It doesn’t happen acutely,” says Ikiz. “Years pass, and then people get these diseases. That’s actually what really scares me about this whole thing. We are seeing air pollution exposure from wildfires. We’re seeing extreme heat. We’re seeing neurotoxin exposure. We’re in an experiment ourselves, with the brain chronically exposed to multiple toxins.”
Other scientists who have taken note of these chronic exposuresresort to similarly dramatic language as that of Nomura and Ikiz. “Hallmarks of Alzheimer disease are evolving relentlessly in metropolitan Mexico City infants, children and young adults,” is part of the title of a recent paper spearheaded by Dr Lilian Calderón-Garcidueñas, a toxicologist who directs the University of Montana’s environmental neuroprevention laboratory. The researchers investigated the contributions of urban air pollutionand ozone to biomarkers of neurodegeneration and found physical hallmarks of Alzheimer’s in 202 of the 203 brains they examined, from residents aged 11 months to 40 years old. “Alzheimer’s disease starting in the brainstem of young children and affecting 99.5% of young urbanites is a serious health crisis,” Calderón-Garcidueñas and her colleagues wrote. Indeed.
Flooding in Stonehaven, Aberdeenshire, in 2020. Photograph: Martin Anderson/PA
Such neurodevelopmental challenges – the effects of environmental degradation on the developing and infant brain – are particularly large, given the climate prognosis. Rat pups exposed in utero to 40C heat miss brain developmental milestones. Heat exposure during neurodevelopment in zebrafish magnifies the toxic effects of lead exposure. In people, early pregnancy exposure to extreme heat is associated with a higher risk of children developing neuropsychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia and anorexia. It is also probable that the ALS-causing neurotoxin can travel in the air.
Of course, these exposures only matter if you make it to an age in which neural rot has a chance to manifest. Neurodegenerative disease mostly makes itself known in middle-aged and elderly people. But, on the other hand, the brain-eating amoeba likely to spread as a result of the climate crisis – which is 97% fatal and will kill someone in a week – mostly infects children who swim in lakes. As children do.
A coordinated effort to fully understand and appreciate the neurological costs of the climate crisis does not yet exist. Ikiz is seeking to rectify this. In spring 2024, she will convene the first meeting of a team of neurologists, neuroscientists and planetary scientists, under the banner of the International Neuro Climate Working Group.
The goal of the working group (which, full disclosure, I have been invited to join) is to wrap a collective head around the problem and seek to recommend treatment practices and policy recommendations accordingly, before society finds itself in the midst of overlapping epidemics. The number of people living with Alzheimer’s is expected to triple by 2050, says Ikiz – and that’s without taking the climate crisis into account. “That scares me,” she says. “Because in 2050, we’ll be like: ‘Ah, this is awful. Let’s try to do something.’ But it will be too late for a lot of people.
“I think that’s why it’s really important right now, as evidence is building, as we’re understanding more, to be speaking and raising awareness on these issues,” she says. “Because we don’t want to come to that point of irreversible damage.”
For neuroscientists considering the climate problem, avoiding that point of no return implies investing in resilience research today. But this is not a story of climate anxiety and mental fortitude. “I’m not talking about psychological resilience,” says Nomura. “I’m talking about biological resilience.”
A research agenda for climatological neuroepidemiology wouldprobably bridge multiple fields and scales of analysis. It would merge insights from neurology, neurochemistry, environmental science, cognitive neuroscience and behavioural economics – from molecular dynamics to the individual brain to whole ecosystems. Nomura, for example, wants to understand how external environmental pressures influence brain health and cognitive development; who is most vulnerable to these pressures and when; and which preventive strategies might bolster neurological resilience against climate-induced stressors. Others want to price these stressors, so policymakers can readily integrate them into climate-action cost-benefit analyses.
Storm devastation in Seaside Heights, New Jersey. Photograph: Mike Groll/AP
For Nomura, it all comes back to stress. Under the right conditions, prenatal exposure to stress can be protective, she says. “It’s like an inoculation, right? You’re artificially exposed to something in utero and you become better at handling it – as long as it is not overwhelmingly toxic.” Stress in pregnancy, in moderation, can perhaps help immunise the foetus against the most deleterious effects of stress later in life. “But everybody has a breaking point,” she says.
Identifying these breaking points is a core challenge of Nomura’s work. And it’s a particularly thorny challenge, in that as a matter of both research ethics and atmospheric physics, she and her colleagues can’t just gin up a hurricane and selectively expose expecting mothers to it. “Human research in this field is limited in a way. We cannot run the gold standard of randomised clinical trials,” she says. “We cannot do it. So we have to take advantage of this horrible natural disaster.”
Recently, Nomura and her colleagues have begun to turn their attention to the developmental effects of heat. They will apply similar methods to those they applied to understanding the effects of Hurricane Sandy – establishing natural cohorts and charting the developmental trajectories in which they’re interested.
The work necessarily proceeds slowly, in part because human research is further complicated by the fact that it takes people longer than animals to develop. Rats zoom through infancy and are sexually mature by about six weeks, whereas for humans it takes more than a decade. “That’s a reason this longitudinal study is really important – and a reason why we cannot just get started on the question right now,” says Nomura. “You cannot buy 10 years’ time. You cannot buy 12 years’ time.” You must wait. And so she waits, and she measures, as the waves continue to crash.
Clayton Page Aldern’s book The Weight of Nature, on the effects of climate change on brain health, is published by Allen Lane on 4 April.
Plastic waste is clogging the Niger River in Bamako, Mali. After it sediments, plastic will become part of the geological record of human impacts on the planet. Credit: Michele Cattani/AFP via Getty
After 15 years of discussion, geologists last week decided that the Anthropocene — generally understood to be the age of irreversible human impacts on the planet — will not become an official epoch in Earth’s geological timeline.
The rejected proposal would have codified the end of the current Holocene epoch, which has been in place since the end of the last ice age 11,700 years ago. It suggested that the Anthropocene started in 1952, when plutonium from hydrogen-bomb tests showed up in the sediment of Crawford Lake near Toronto, Canada.
The vote has drawn controversy over procedural details, and debate about its legitimacy continues. But whether or not it’s formally approved as a stratigraphic term, the idea of the Anthropocene is now firmly rooted in research. So, how are scientists using the term, and what does it mean to them and their fields?
‘It’s a term that belongs to everyone’
As head of the Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity at the University of York, UK, Chris Thomas has perhaps more riding on the term than most. “When the news of this — what sounds like a slightly dodgy vote — happened, I sort of wondered, is it the end of us? But I think not,” he says.
For Thomas, the word Anthropocene neatly summarizes the sense that humans are part of Earth’s system and integral to its processes — what he calls indivisible connectedness. “That helps move us away from the notion that somehow humanity is apart from the rest of nature and natural systems,” he says. “It’s undoable — the change is everywhere.”
The concept of an era of human-driven change also provides convenient common ground for him to collaborate with researchers from other disciplines. “This is something that people in the arts and humanities and the social sciences have picked up as well,” he says. “It is a means of enabling communication about the extent to which we are living in a truly unprecedented and human-altered world.”
Seen through that lens, the fact that the Anthropocene has been formally rejected because scientists can’t agree on when it began seems immaterial. “Many people in the humanities who are using the phrase find the concept of the articulation of a particular year, based on a deposit in a particular lake, a ridiculous way of framing the concept of a human-altered planet.”
Jacquelyn Gill, a palaeoecologist at the University of Maine in Orono, agrees. “It’s a term that belongs to everyone. To people working in philosophy and literary criticism, in the arts, in the humanities, the sciences,” she says. “I think it’s far more meaningful in the way that it is currently being used, than in any attempts that stratigraphers could have made to restrict or define it in some narrow sense.”
She adds: “It serves humanity best as a loose concept that we can use to define something that we all widely understand, which is that we live in an era where humans are the dominant force on ecological and geological processes.”
Capturing human influences
The idea of the Anthropocene is especially helpful to make clear that humans have been shaping the planet for thousands of years, and that not all of those changes have been bad, Gill says. “We could do a better job of thinking about human–environment relationships in ways that are not inherently negative all the time,” she says. “People are not a monolith, and neither are our attitudes or relationships to nature.”
Some 80% of biodiversity is currently stewarded on Indigenous lands, Gill points out. “Which should tell you something, right? That it’s not the presence of people that’s the problem,” she says. “The solution to those problems is changing the way that many dominant cultures relate to the natural world.”
The concept of the Anthropocene is owned by many fields, Gill says. “This reiterates the importance of understanding that the role of people on our planet requires many different ways of knowing and many different disciplines.”
In a world in which the threat of climate change dominates environmental debates, the term Anthropocene can help to broaden the discussion, says Yadvinder Malhi, a biodiversity researcher at the University of Oxford, UK.
“I use it all the time. For me, it captures the time where human influence has a global planetary effect, and it’s multidimensional. It’s much more than just climate change,” he says. “It’s what we’re doing. The oceans, the resources we are extracting, habitats changing.”
He adds: “I need that term when I’m trying to capture this idea of humans affecting the planet in multiple ways because of the size of our activity.”
The looseness of the term is popular, but would a formal definition help in any way? Malhi thinks it would. “There’s no other term available that captures the global multidimensional impacts on the planet,” he says. “But there is a problem in not having a formal definition if people are using it in different terms, in different ways.”
Although the word ‘Anthropocene’ makes some researchers think of processes that began 10,000 years ago, others consider it to mean those of the past century. “I think a formal adoption, like a definition, would actually help to clarify that.”
A 1953 nuclear weapons test in Nevada was among the human activities that could have marked the Anthropocene. NNSA/NEVADA FIELD OFFICE/SCIENCE SOURCE
For now, we’re still in the Holocene.
Science has confirmed that a panel of two dozen geologists has voted down a proposal to end the Holocene—our current span of geologic time, which began 11,700 years ago at the end of the last ice age—and inaugurate a new epoch, the Anthropocene. Starting in the 1950s, it would have marked a time when humanity’s influence on the planet became overwhelming. The vote, first reported by The New York Times, is a stunning—though not unexpected—rebuke for the proposal, which has been working its way through a formal approval process for more than a decade.
“The decision is definitive,” says Philip Gibbard, a geologist at the University of Cambridge who is on the panel and serves as secretary-general of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), the body that governs the geologic timescale. “There are no outstanding issues to be resolved. Case closed.”
The leaders of the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG), which developed the proposal for consideration by ICS’s Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy, are not yet ready to admit defeat. They note that the online tally, in which 12 out of 18 subcommission members voted against the proposal, was leaked to the press without approval of the panel’s chair. “There remain several issues that need to be resolved about the validity of the vote and the circumstances surrounding it,” says Colin Waters, a geologist at the University of Leicester who chaired AWG.
Few opponents of the Anthropocene proposal doubted the enormous impact that human influence, including climate change, is having on the planet. But some felt the proposed marker of the epoch—some 10 centimeters of mud from Canada’s Crawford Lake that captures the global surge in fossil fuel burning, fertilizer use, and atomic bomb fallout that began in the 1950s—isn’t definitive enough.
Others questioned whether it’s even possible to affix one date to the start of humanity’s broad planetary influence: Why not the rise of agriculture? Why not the vast changes that followed European encroachment on the New World? “The Anthropocene epoch was never deep enough to understand human transformation of this planet,” says Erle Ellis, a geographer at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County who resigned last year in protest from AWG.
Opponents also felt AWG made too many announcements to the press over the years while being slow to submit a proposal to the subcommission. “The Anthropocene epoch was pushed through the media from the beginning—a publicity drive,” says Stanley Finney, a stratigrapher at California State University Long Beach and head of the International Union of Geological Sciences, which would have had final approval of the proposal.
Finney also complains that from the start, AWG was determined to secure an “epoch” categorization, and ignored or countered proposals for a less formal Anthropocene designation. If they had only made their formal proposal sooner, they could have avoided much lost time, Finney adds. “It would have been rejected 10 years earlier if they had not avoided presenting it to the stratigraphic community for careful consideration.”
The Anthropocene backers will now have to wait for a decade before their proposal can be considered again. ICS has long instituted this mandatory cooling-off period, given how furious debates can turn, for example, over the boundary between the Pliocene and Pleistocene, and whether the Quaternary—our current geologic period, a category above epochs—should exist at all.
Even if it is not formally recognized by geologists, the Anthropocene is here to stay. It is used in art exhibits, journal titles, and endless books. And Gibbard, Ellis, and others have advanced the view that it can remain an informal geologic term, calling it the “Anthropocene event.” Like the Great Oxygenation Event, in which cyanobacteria flushed the atmosphere with oxygen billions of years ago, the Anthropocene marks a huge transition, but one without an exact date. “Let us work together to ensure the creation of a far deeper and more inclusive Anthropocene event,” Ellis says.
Waters and his colleagues will continue to press that the Anthropocene is worthy of recognition in the geologic timescale, even if that advocacy has to continue in an informal capacity, he says. Although small in size, Anthropocene strata such as the 10 centimeters of lake mud are distinct and can be traced using more than 100 durable geochemical signals, he says. And there is no going back to where the planet was 100 years ago, he says. “The Earth system changes that mark the Anthropocene are collectively irreversible.”
A panel of experts voted down a proposal to officially declare the start of a new interval of geologic time, one defined by humanity’s changes to the planet.
In weighing their decision, scientists considered the effect on the world of nuclear activity. A 1946 test blast over Bikini atoll. Credit: Jack Rice/Associated Press
Not yet, scientists have decided, after a debate that has spanned nearly 15 years. Or the blink of an eye, depending on how you look at it.
A committee of roughly two dozen scholars has, by a large majority, voted down a proposal to declare the start of the Anthropocene, a newly created epoch of geologic time, according to an internal announcement of the voting results seen by The New York Times.
By geologists’ current timeline of Earth’s 4.6-billion-year history, our world right now is in the Holocene, which began 11,700 years ago with the most recent retreat of the great glaciers. Amending the chronology to say we had moved on to the Anthropocene would represent an acknowledgment that recent, human-induced changes to geological conditions had been profound enough to bring the Holocene to a close.
The declaration would shape terminology in textbooks, research articles and museums worldwide. It would guide scientists in their understanding of our still-unfolding present for generations, perhaps even millenniums, to come.
In the end, though, the members of the committee that voted on the Anthropocene over the past month were not only weighing how consequential this period had been for the planet. They also had to consider when, precisely, it began.
By the definition that an earlier panel of experts spent nearly a decade and a half debating and crafting, the Anthropocene started in the mid-20th century, when nuclear bomb tests scattered radioactive fallout across our world. To several members of the scientific committee that considered the panel’s proposal in recent weeks, this definition was too limited, too awkwardly recent, to be a fitting signpost of Homo sapiens’s reshaping of planet Earth.
“It constrains, it confines, it narrows down the whole importance of the Anthropocene,” said Jan A. Piotrowski, a committee member and geologist at Aarhus University in Denmark. “What was going on during the onset of agriculture? How about the Industrial Revolution? How about the colonizing of the Americas, of Australia?”
“Human impact goes much deeper into geological time,” said another committee member, Mike Walker, an earth scientist and professor emeritus at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. “If we ignore that, we are ignoring the true impact, the real impact, that humans have on our planet.”
Hours after the voting results were circulated within the committee early Tuesday, some members said they were surprised at the margin of votes against the Anthropocene proposal compared with those in favor: 12 to four, with two abstentions. (Another three committee members neither voted nor formally abstained.)
Even so, it was unclear on Tuesday whether the results stood as a conclusive rejection or whether they might still be challenged or appealed. In an email to The Times, the committee’s chair, Jan A. Zalasiewicz, said there were “some procedural issues to consider” but declined to discuss them further. Dr. Zalasiewicz, a geologist at the University of Leicester, has expressed support for canonizing the Anthropocene.
This question of how to situate our time in the narrative arc of Earth history has thrust the rarefied world of geological timekeepers into an unfamiliar limelight.
The grandly named chapters of our planet’s history are governed by a body of scientists, the International Union of Geological Sciences. The organization uses rigorous criteria to decide when each chapter started and which characteristics defined it. The aim is to uphold common global standards for expressing the planet’s history.
Polyethylene being extruded and fed into a cooling bath during plastics manufacture, circa 1950. Credit: Hulton Archive, via Getty Images
Geoscientists don’t deny our era stands out within that long history. Radionuclides from nuclear tests. Plastics and industrial ash. Concrete and metal pollutants. Rapid greenhouse warming. Sharply increased species extinctions. These and other products of modern civilization are leaving unmistakable remnants in the mineral record, particularly since the mid-20th century.
Still, to qualify for its own entry on the geologic time scale, the Anthropocene would have to be defined in a very particular way, one that would meet the needs of geologists and not necessarily those of the anthropologists, artists and others who are already using the term.
That’s why several experts who have voiced skepticism about enshrining the Anthropocene emphasized that the vote against it shouldn’t be read as a referendum among scientists on the broad state of the Earth. “This was a narrow, technical matter for geologists, for the most part,” said one of those skeptics, Erle C. Ellis, an environmental scientist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. “This has nothing to do with the evidence that people are changing the planet,” Dr. Ellis said. “The evidence just keeps growing.”
Francine M.G. McCarthy, a micropaleontologist at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, is the opposite of a skeptic: She helped lead some of the research to support ratifying the new epoch.
“We are in the Anthropocene, irrespective of a line on the time scale,” Dr. McCarthy said. “And behaving accordingly is our only path forward.”
The Anthropocene proposal got its start in 2009, when a working group was convened to investigate whether recent planetary changes merited a place on the geologic timeline. After years of deliberation, the group, which came to include Dr. McCarthy, Dr. Ellis and some three dozen others, decided that they did. The group also decided that the best start date for the new period was around 1950.
The group then had to choose a physical site that would most clearly show a definitive break between the Holocene and the Anthropocene. They settled on Crawford Lake, in Ontario, where the deep waters have preserved detailed records of geochemical change within the sediments at the bottom.
Last fall, the working group submitted its Anthropocene proposal to the first of three governing committees under the International Union of Geological Sciences. Sixty percent of each committee has to approve the proposal for it to advance to the next.
The members of the first one, the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy, submitted their votes starting in early February. (Stratigraphy is the branch of geology concerned with rock layers and how they relate in time. The Quaternary is the ongoing geologic period that began 2.6 million years ago.)
Under the rules of stratigraphy, each interval of Earth time needs a clear, objective starting point, one that applies worldwide. The Anthropocene working group proposed the mid-20th century because it bracketed the postwar explosion of economic growth, globalization, urbanization and energy use. But several members of the subcommission said humankind’s upending of Earth was a far more sprawling story, one that might not even have a single start date across every part of the planet.
The world’s first full-scale atomic power station in Britain in 1956. Credit: Hulton Archive, via Getty Images
This is why Dr. Walker, Dr. Piotrowski and others prefer to describe the Anthropocene as an “event,” not an “epoch.” In the language of geology, events are a looser term. They don’t appear on the official timeline, and no committees need to approve their start dates.
Yet many of the planet’s most significant happenings are called events, including mass extinctions, rapid expansions of biodiversity and the filling of Earth’s skies with oxygen 2.1 to 2.4 billion years ago.
Even if the subcommission’s vote is upheld and the Anthropocene proposal is rebuffed, the new epoch could still be added to the timeline at some later point. It would, however, have to go through the whole process of discussion and voting all over again.
Time will march on. Evidence of our civilization’s effects on Earth will continue accumulating in the rocks. The task of interpreting what it all means, and how it fits into the grand sweep of history, might fall to the future inheritors of our world.
“Our impact is here to stay and to be recognizable in the future in the geological record — there is absolutely no question about this,” Dr. Piotrowski said. “It will be up to the people that will be coming after us to decide how to rank it.”
Raymond Zhong reports on climate and environmental issues for The Times.
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Un comité de expertos ha tumbado la propuesta de declarar un nuevo momento geológico, pero el propio presidente denuncia irregularidades en la votación
Manuel Ansede
Madrid –
Extracción de un testigo de sedimentos del fondo del lago Crawford, a las afueras de Toronto (Canadá). TIM PATTERSON / UNIVERSIDAD DE CARLETON
La idea del Antropoceno —que la humanidad vive desde 1950 en una nueva época geológica caracterizada por la contaminación humana— se ha hecho tan popular en los últimos años que hasta la Real Academia Española adoptó el término en el Diccionario de la Lengua en 2021. Los académicos se dieron esta vez demasiada prisa. El concepto sigue en el aire, en medio de una vehemente polémica entre especialistas. Miembros del comité de expertos que debe tomar la decisión en la Unión Internacional de Ciencias Geológicas (UICG) —la Subcomisión de Estratigrafía del Cuaternario— han filtrado este martes al diario The New York Times que han votado mayoritariamente en contra de reconocer la existencia del Antropoceno. Sin embargo, el presidente de la Subcomisión, el geólogo Jan Zalasiewicz, explica a EL PAÍS que el resultado preliminar de la votación se ha anunciado sin su autorización y que todavía quedan “algunos asuntos pendientes con los votos que hay que resolver”. La humanidad todavía no sabe en qué época geológica vive.
El químico holandés Paul Crutzen, ganador del Nobel de Química por iluminar el agujero de la capa de ozono, planteó en el año 2000 que el planeta había entrado en una nueva época, provocada por el impacto brutal de los seres humanos. Un equipo internacional de especialistas, el Grupo de Trabajo del Antropoceno, ha analizado los hechos científicos desde 2009 y el año pasado presentó una propuesta para proclamar oficialmente esta nueva época geológica, marcada por la radiactividad de las bombas atómicas y los contaminantes procedentes de la quema de carbón y petróleo. El diminuto lago Crawford, a las afueras de Toronto (Canadá), era el lugar indicado para ejemplificar el inicio del Antropoceno, gracias a los sedimentos de su fondo, imperturbados desde hace siglos.
La mayoría de los miembros de la Subcomisión de Estratigrafía del Cuaternario de la UICG ha votado en contra de la propuesta, según el periódico estadounidense. El geólogo británico Colin Waters, líder del Grupo de Trabajo del Antropoceno, explica a EL PAÍS que se ha enterado por la prensa. “Todavía no hemos recibido una confirmación oficial directamente del secretario de la Subcomisión de Estratigrafía del Cuaternario. Parece que The New York Times recibe los resultados antes que nosotros, es muy decepcionante”, lamenta Waters.
El geólogo reconoce que el dictamen, si se confirma, sería el fin de su propuesta actual, pero no se rinde. “Tenemos muchos investigadores eminentes que desean continuar como grupo, de manera informal, defendiendo las evidencias de que el Antropoceno debería ser formalizado como una época”, afirma. A su juicio, los estratos geológicos actuales —contaminados por isótopos radiactivos, microplásticos, cenizas y pesticidas— han cambiado de manera irreversible respecto a los del Holoceno, la época geológica iniciada hace más de 10.000 años, tras la última glaciación. “Dadas las pruebas existentes, que siguen aumentando, no me sorprendería un futuro llamamiento a reconsiderar nuestra propuesta”, opina Waters, de la Universidad de Leicester.
El jefe del Grupo de Trabajo del Antropoceno sostiene que hay “algunas cuestiones de procedimiento” que ponen en duda la validez de la votación. La geóloga italiana Silvia Peppoloni, jefa de la Comisión de Geoética de la UICG, confirma que su equipo ha realizado un informe sobre esta pelea entre la Subcomisión de Estratigrafía del Cuaternario y el Grupo de Trabajo del Antropoceno. El documento está sobre la mesa del presidente de la UICG, el británico John Ludden.
La geóloga canadiense Francine McCarthy estaba convencida de que el lago Crawford convencería a los escépticos. Desde fuera parece pequeño, con apenas 250 metros de largo, pero su profundidad roza los 25 metros. Sus aguas superficiales no se mezclan con las de su lecho, por lo que el suelo del fondo se puede analizar como una lasaña, en la que cada capa acumula sedimentos procedentes de la atmósfera. Ese calendario subacuático del lago Crawford revela la denominada Gran Aceleración, el momento alrededor de 1950 en el que la humanidad empezó a dejar una huella cada vez más evidente, con el lanzamiento de bombas atómicas, la quema masiva de petróleo y carbón y la extinción de especies.
“Ignorar el enorme impacto de los humanos en nuestro planeta desde mediados del siglo XX tiene potencialmente consecuencias dañinas, al minimizar la importancia de los datos científicos para hacer frente al evidente cambio en el sistema de la Tierra, como ya señaló Paul Crutzen hace casi 25 años”, advierte McCarthy.
Grupo rejeitou que mudanças sejam profundas o bastante para encerrar o Holoceno
Raymond Zhong
5 de março de 2024
O Triássico foi o amanhecer dos dinossauros. O Paleogeno viu a ascensão dos mamíferos. O Pleistoceno incluiu as últimas eras glaciais.
Está na hora de marcar a transformação da humanidade no planeta com seu próprio capítulo na história da Terra, o “Antropoceno”, ou a época humana?
Ainda não, decidiram os cientistas, após um debate que durou quase 15 anos. Ou um piscar de olhos, dependendo do ângulo pelo qual você olha.
Um comitê de cerca de duas dezenas de estudiosos votou, em grande maioria, contra uma proposta de declarar o início do Antropoceno, uma época recém-criada do tempo geológico, de acordo com um anúncio interno dos resultados da votação visto pelo The New York Times.
Pela linha do tempo atual dos geólogos da história de 4,6 bilhões de anos da Terra, nosso mundo agora está no Holoceno, que começou há 11,7 mil anos com o recuo mais recente dos grandes glaciares.
Alterar a cronologia para dizer que avançamos para o Antropoceno representaria um reconhecimento de que as mudanças recentes induzidas pelo homem nas condições geológicas foram profundas o suficiente para encerrar o Holoceno.
A declaração moldaria a terminologia em livros didáticos, artigos de pesquisa e museus em todo o mundo. Orientaria os cientistas em sua compreensão do nosso presente ainda em desenvolvimento por gerações, talvez até por milênios.
No fim das contas, porém, os membros do comitê que votaram sobre o Antropoceno nas últimas semanas não estavam apenas considerando o quão determinante esse período havia sido para o planeta. Eles também tiveram que considerar quando, precisamente, ele começou.
Pela definição que um painel anterior de especialistas passou quase uma década e meia debatendo e elaborando, o Antropoceno começou na metade do século 20, quando testes de bombas nucleares espalharam material radioativo por todo o nosso mundo.
Para vários membros do comitê científico que avaliaram a proposta do painel nas últimas semanas, essa definição era muito limitada, muito recente e inadequada para ser um marco adequado da remodelação do Homo sapiens no planeta Terra.
“Isso restringe, confina, estreita toda a importância do Antropoceno”, disse Jan A. Piotrowski, membro do comitê e geólogo da Universidade de Aarhus, na Dinamarca. “O que estava acontecendo durante o início da agricultura? E a Revolução Industrial? E a colonização das Américas, da Austrália?”
“O impacto humano vai muito mais fundo no tempo geológico”, disse outro membro do comitê, Mike Walker, cientista da Terra e professor emérito da Universidade de Gales Trinity Saint David. “Se ignorarmos isso, estamos ignorando o verdadeiro impacto que os humanos têm em nosso planeta.”
Horas após a circulação dos resultados da votação dentro do comitê nesta terça-feira (5) de manhã, alguns membros disseram que ficaram surpresos com a margem de votos contra a proposta do Antropoceno em comparação com os a favor: 12 a 4, com 2 abstenções.
Mesmo assim, nesta terça de manhã não ficou claro se os resultados representavam uma rejeição conclusiva ou se ainda poderiam ser contestados ou apelados. Em um e-mail para o Times, o presidente do comitê, Jan A. Zalasiewicz, disse que havia “algumas questões procedimentais a considerar”, mas se recusou a discuti-las mais a fundo.
Zalasiewicz, geólogo da Universidade de Leicester, expressou apoio à canonização do Antropoceno.
Essa questão de como situar nosso tempo na narrativa da história da Terra colocou o mundo dos guardiões do tempo geológico sob uma luz desconhecida.
Os capítulos grandiosamente nomeados da história de nosso planeta são governados por um grupo de cientistas, a União Internacional de Ciências Geológicas. A organização usa critérios rigorosos para decidir quando cada capítulo começou e quais características o definiram. O objetivo é manter padrões globais comuns para expressar a história do planeta.
Os geocientistas não negam que nossa era se destaca dentro dessa longa história. Radionuclídeos de testes nucleares. Plásticos e cinzas industriais. Poluentes de concreto e metal. Aquecimento global rápido. Aumento acentuado de extinções de espécies. Esses e outros produtos da civilização moderna estão deixando vestígios inconfundíveis no registro mineral, especialmente desde meados do século 20.
Ainda assim, para se qualificar para a entrada na escala de tempo geológico, o Antropoceno teria que ser definido de uma maneira muito específica, que atendesse às necessidades dos geólogos e não necessariamente dos antropólogos, artistas e outros que já estão usando o termo.
Por isso, vários especialistas que expressaram ceticismo quanto à consagração do Antropoceno enfatizaram que o voto contra não deve ser interpretado como um referendo entre cientistas sobre o amplo estado da Terra.
“Este é um assunto específico e técnico para os geólogos, em sua maioria”, disse um desses céticos, Erle C. Ellis, um cientista ambiental da Universidade de Maryland. “Isso não tem nada a ver com a evidência de que as pessoas estão mudando o planeta”, afirmou Ellis. “A evidência continua crescendo.”
Francine M.G. McCarthy, micropaleontóloga da Universidade Brock em St. Catharines, Ontário (Canadá), é tem visão oposta: ela ajudou a liderar algumas das pesquisas para apoiar a ratificação da nova época.
“Estamos no Antropoceno, independentemente de uma linha na escala de tempo”, disse McCarthy. “E agir de acordo é o nosso único caminho a seguir.”
A proposta do Antropoceno teve início em 2009, quando um grupo de trabalho foi convocado para investigar se as recentes mudanças planetárias mereciam um lugar na linha do tempo geológica.
Após anos de deliberação, o grupo, que passou a incluir McCarthy, Ellis e cerca de três dezenas de outros, decidiu que sim. O grupo também decidiu que a melhor data de início para o novo período era por volta de 1950.
O grupo então teve que escolher um local físico que mostrasse de forma mais clara uma quebra definitiva entre o Holoceno e o Antropoceno. Eles escolheram o Lago Crawford, em Ontário, no Canadá, onde as águas profundas preservaram registros detalhados de mudanças geoquímicas nos sedimentos do fundo.
No outono passado, o grupo de trabalho enviou sua proposta do Antropoceno para o primeiro dos três comitês governantes da União Internacional de Ciências Geológicas —60% de cada comitê precisam aprovar a proposta para que ela avance para o próximo.
Os membros do primeiro comitê, a Subcomissão de Estratigrafia do Quaternário, enviaram seus votos a partir do início de fevereiro. (Estratigrafia é o ramo da geologia que se dedica ao estudo das camadas de rocha e como elas se relacionam no tempo. O Quaternário é o período geológico em curso que começou há 2,6 milhões de anos.)
De acordo com as regras da estratigrafia, cada intervalo de tempo da Terra precisa de um ponto de partida claro e objetivo, que se aplique em todo o mundo. O grupo de trabalho do Antropoceno propôs meados do século 20 porque isso abrangia a explosão do crescimento econômico pós-guerra, a globalização, a urbanização e o uso de energia.
Mas vários membros da subcomissão disseram que a transformação da humanidade na Terra era uma história muito mais abrangente, que talvez nem tenha uma única data de início em todas as partes do planeta.
Por isso, Walker, Piotrowski e outros preferem descrever o Antropoceno como um “evento”, não como uma “época”. Na linguagem da geologia, eventos são um termo mais amplo. Eles não aparecem na linha do tempo oficial, e nenhum comitê precisa aprovar suas datas de início.
No entanto, muitos dos acontecimentos mais significativos do planeta são chamados de eventos, incluindo extinções em massa, expansões rápidas da biodiversidade e o preenchimento dos céus da Terra com oxigênio há 2,1 bilhões a 2,4 bilhões de anos.
Mesmo que o voto da subcomissão seja mantido e a proposta do Antropoceno seja rejeitada, a nova época ainda poderá ser adicionada à linha do tempo em algum momento posterior. No entanto, terá que passar por todo o processo de discussão e votação novamente.
A member of the Indigenous Baduy tribe works at his field on Indonesia’s Java island. Anthropologist Gonzalo Oviedo says Indigenous communities in Southeast Asia “tend to recognize many more varieties of plant subspecies.” Credit: Bay Ismoyo/AFP via Getty Images
The past few years have been a triumph for traditional Indigenous knowledge, the body of observations, innovations and practices developed by Indigenous peoples throughout history with regard to their local environment.
First, the world’s top scientific and environmental policymaking bodies embraced it. Then, in 2022, the Biden administration instructed U.S. federal agencies to include it in their decision making processes. And, last year, the National Science Foundation announced $30 million in grants to fund it.
Traditional Indigenous knowledge, also called traditional ecological knowledge or traditional knowledge, is compiled by tribes according to their distinct culture and generally is transmitted orally between generations. It has evolved since time immemorial, yet mainstream institutions have only begun to recognize its value for helping to address pressing global problems like climate change and biodiversity loss, to say nothing of its cultural importance.
Traditional Indigenous knowledge has helped communities sustainably manage territories and natural resources—from predicting natural disasters to protecting biologically important areas and identifying medicinal plants. Today, more than a quarter of land globally is occupied, managed or owned by Indigenous peoples and local communities, with roughly 80 percent of Earth’s biodiversity located on Indigenous territories. Study after study has confirmed that those lands have better environmental outcomes than alternatives.
But, just as the links between those outcomes and Indigenous expertise are becoming more widely acknowledged, the communities stewarding this knowledge are coming under increasing threat from land grabbing, rapid cultural changes and other factors.
Then there is the backlash from the right and the left. As traditional Indigenous knowledge has moved into the mainstream alongside science for a better understanding and management of the natural world, critics on all sides have emerged. Some have argued that just as Christian creationism is incompatible with science, so too is traditional knowledge—this argument is widely seen as premised on a misunderstanding about what traditional knowledge is. On the other end of the ideological spectrum, some progressives have balked at the notion that there are fundamental differences between the two systems.
For a better understanding of what traditional knowledge is, Inside Climate News spoke with Gonzalo Oviedo, an anthropologist and environmental scientist who has worked on social aspects of conservation for more than three decades. This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
For people who may not know much about traditional knowledge, can you give some examples of what it is?
One key element of traditional knowledge is the understanding of where key biodiversity areas are located in the landscape where communities have traditionally lived.
This is exactly what conservation science does: identify areas that contain important genetic resources, or areas that contain important features that influence the rest of the ecosystem.
Traditional cultures do exactly this with areas that are key for the reproduction of animal species, for conserving water sources or for harboring certain types of plants including medicinal plants. Often, those areas become sacred places that Indigenous communities protect very rigorously. Protecting those key biodiversity areas is one of the most important management practices and it’s based on an understanding of how an ecosystem works in a given area.
Another element is closely related to the work of botanists, which is the creation of very sophisticated botanic taxonomy (the systematic classification of organisms). There are taxonomic systems generated by Indigenous peoples that are more sophisticated than mainstream taxonomy. In Southeast Asia, for example, Indigenous communities tend to recognize many more varieties of plant subspecies based on their practices and lifeways. They see the plants in a more detailed way and notice more differences. They also have more linguistic terms for diverse shades of green that represent different types of plants.
A third element is the understanding of the biological succession of forests and other ecosystems. Communities have very detailed knowledge of how ecosystems have changed and evolved over long periods of time. People who live within ecosystems, and in a way where their livelihoods are connected to the ecosystem, are a fundamental source of direct knowledge of how ecosystems evolve.
In places like the Arctic, where people are dependent on their ability to predict changes in the climate, there has been a lot of important research done with Indigenous communities to systematize their climate knowledge. In dry land climates, where traditional communities are very vulnerable to changes in precipitation, they’ve identified key biodiversity areas that serve as reservoirs for periods when droughts are prolonged and these communities strictly protect those reservoirs. Fishing communities in the Pacific are extremely knowledgeable about marine biodiversity and the management of those ecosystems.
What developments have contributed to more mainstream acceptance of traditional knowledge? It’s hard to imagine that Indigenous peoples’ advocacy for stronger protection of their rights hasn’t played a role. Have there been other developments contributing to the growing recognition of the value of this knowledge system to global conservation efforts?
The process of integrating traditional knowledge into the mainstream is still relatively new. Only in the last 20 years or so has there been more significant progress on this. The Convention on Biological Diversity, the CBD, entered into force in 1993 and has a very important provision in Article 8(j) on the recognition of traditional knowledge and the need to “respect, preserve and maintain” it. As a result of that provision, there has been a lot of interest in how to integrate that into public policy, biodiversity management and related fields.
The evolution of nature conservation paradigms in the last 20 to 30 years or so has also been an important driver. Three decades ago it was still very difficult to get conservation organizations to recognize that the traditional knowledge of Indigenous and local communities is a positive factor for conservation and that working together with those communities is fundamental. Today, the conservation movement universally agrees to this.
When you say “evolution of nature conservation paradigms,” are you referring to the shift away from “fortress conservation,” or the model where protected areas were fenced off and Indigenous and local communities removed from their traditional lands in the name of conservation?
There have been several factors contributing to the change and moving away from the fortress conservation concept to inclusive conservation has been one of them. By inclusive I mean the understanding that Indigenous and community held lands are better protected through traditional management practices and the value of traditional knowledge associated with that.
It is also better recognized today that working for sustainable livelihoods like subsistence farming and harvesting is good for conservation. In the past, livelihood activities were seen as a threat to conservation. Today, it is widely accepted that by supporting sustainable livelihoods, you’re supporting conservation as well.
Also, today, it is recognized that humans have always managed ecosystems. The concept of “empty wilderness” is no longer viable for conservation and it’s not true in most parts of the world. These are several ways that the conservation paradigm is evolving. It’s safe to say that not everyone is on the same page. But things are evolving in the direction of inclusiveness.
What are some of the biggest challenges to ensuring that traditional knowledge is protected and, if approved by communities, transmitted for use in mainstream conservation efforts?
There are two main challenges. One relates to how other knowledge systems see traditional knowledge.
This is essentially the problem of getting people to understand what traditional knowledge is, and overcoming unhelpful and incorrect stereotypes about it. For example, some people say that, unlike science, traditional knowledge is not based on evidence or is not based on credible scientific processes that allow for verification. That is not necessarily true.
There are, of course, differences between traditional knowledge and scientific knowledge. Traditional knowledge tends to use more qualitative methods and less quantitative approaches and methodologies compared to what science does today.
But there are several aspects in which both are quite similar. To start, the key motivation in both systems is problem solving. The intellectual process of both sometimes works through comparisons and applies methods of trial and error. You also have in both the process of moving from practical knowledge to abstraction, and also feedback looping and adaptive learning.
Misunderstandings or stereotypes about what traditional knowledge is have led to unfriendly public policies in natural resource management and education systems.
To address this, institutions like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) need to continue collecting evidence and information about traditional knowledge and communicate its value to policymakers. That is still a fundamental need.
A second major challenge relates to the erosion of the intergenerational transmission of traditional knowledge. That transmission mostly happens through oral systems that require direct physical contact between different generations. That is being lost because of demographic changes, migration and the use of formal education systems that take children into schools and separate them physically from transmitters of traditional knowledge. This is a serious problem but there are examples of helpful actions that have been implemented in places like Ecuador, where the formal education system works together with Indigenous communities under an inter-cultural model.
Another aspect of this is the loss of knowledge. If there is lack of transmission or insufficient transmission between generations, when elders die a significant amount of knowledge dies with them.
Cultural change is also a factor. People are coming into contact with other forms of knowledge, some that are presented in a more dynamic way, like on television, and that tend to capture the attention of younger people.
The pace of change is happening so fast. Traditional knowledge is transmitted slowly through in person contact and in the context of daily life. If the pace of cultural change isn’t managed, and communities aren’t supported in their maintenance of knowledge transmission, then that knowledge will be irreversibly lost.
There has been some pushback to the incorporation of traditional knowledge alongside science in policy making and into education curriculums. Critics have analogized traditional knowledge with “creationism.” What do you make of this?
It’s important to understand precisely what traditional knowledge is and to differentiate it from spirituality.
Communities often connect spirituality with traditional knowledge. Spirituality is part of the traditional life of the communities, but spirituality is not in itself traditional knowledge. For example, people in Laos fishing communities that live around wetlands have a sophisticated knowledge of how wetlands function. They have for generations fished and taken resources from the wetlands.
Based on their traditional knowledge of the wetlands, they understand the need for rules to avoid depletion of fish populations by preserving key areas for reproduction and ecological processes. They have developed a set of norms so people understand they cannot fish in certain areas, and those norms take place through spirituality. They say, “You can’t fish in this area because this is where our spirits live and these spirits shouldn’t be interfered with.” This becomes a powerful norm because it connects with a deep spiritual value of the community.
This doesn’t mean that when recognizing the traditional knowledge of the community, one has to take the topic of the spirits as knowledge that has to be validated. The spiritual aspect is the normative part, articulated around beliefs, it is not the knowledge. The same thing goes for practices protecting key biodiversity areas. Traditional cultures all over the world have sacred sites, waters, and they are based on some knowledge of how the ecosystem works and the need to protect key and sensitive areas. Traditional knowledge is essentially problem solving, practical and develops through empirical processes of observation and experience. You have to distinguish it from spirituality, that develops through stories, myths and visions from spiritual leaders.
The relationship between knowledge and spiritual beliefs happened in a similar way in the history of western science and with traditional Chinese medicine. Historically, you will find that Chinese medical science was intimately linked to Taoist religion and Confucianism. Yet the value of Chinese medicine doesn’t mean that you have to adopt Taoism or Confucianism. It takes a long time for societies to understand how to distinguish these things because their connections are very complex.
What is at stake if traditional knowledge is lost?
First, that would be a loss for all of humanity. There has been recent research showing that traditional knowledge can benefit the whole of society if understood and transmitted to other knowledge systems.
There are certain aspects of traditional knowledge that, if lost, will be difficult to recuperate like elements of botanic taxonomy that are not recorded. If lost, we’re losing an important part of human knowledge.
Second, traditional knowledge is important for cultures that have generated and use that knowledge, especially for their adaptation to climatic and other changes. If properly recognized and supported, that knowledge can be a factor of positive development and evolution for those communities. Change is happening everywhere and will continue to happen in traditional societies. But there are different types of cultural change and some are destructive to traditional communities, like the absorption of invasive external values and mythologies that completely destroy young peoples’ cultural background and erode the fabrics of traditional societies.
There is also cultural change that can be positive if it is well managed. Young peoples’ use of technology could be a good source of change if it is used to help maintain and transmit their traditional culture. That can prompt pride and value in communities, and promote intercultural understanding which is fundamental in a world where there is still so much cultural discrimination against Indigenous peoples and a lack of understanding of their cultures and value systems.
Traditional knowledge can play an important role in intercultural dialogues. We need healing processes within societies so that cultures can speak to each other on equal footing, which unfortunately isn’t the case in many places today.
Katie Surma is a reporter at Inside Climate News focusing on international environmental law and justice. Before joining ICN, she practiced law, specializing in commercial litigation. She also wrote for a number of publications and her stories have appeared in the Washington Post, USA Today, Chicago Tribune, Seattle Times and The Associated Press, among others. Katie has a master’s degree in investigative journalism from Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, an LLM in international rule of law and security from ASU’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, a J.D. from Duquesne University, and was a History of Art and Architecture major at the University of Pittsburgh. Katie lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with her husband, Jim Crowell.
Daniel Swain studies extreme floods. And droughts. And wildfires. Then he explains them to the rest of us.
February 6, 2024
By Tracie White
Illustrations by Tim O’Brien
7:00 a.m., 45 degrees F
The moment Daniel Swain wakes up, he gets whipped about by hurricane-force winds. “A Category 5, literally overnight, hits Acapulco,” says the 34-year-old climate scientist and self-described weather geek, who gets battered daily by the onslaught of catastrophic weather headlines: wildfires, megafloods, haboobs (an intense dust storm), atmospheric rivers, bomb cyclones. Everyone’s asking: Did climate change cause these disasters? And, more and more, they want Swain to answer.
Swain, PhD ’16, rolls over in bed in Boulder, Colo., and checks his cell phone for emails. Then, retainer still in his mouth, he calls back the first reporter of the day. It’s October 25, and Isabella Kwai at the New York Times wants to know whether climate change is responsible for the record-breaking speed and ferocity of Hurricane Otis, which rapidly intensified and made landfall in Acapulco as the eastern Pacific’s strongest hurricane on record. It caught everyone off guard. Swain posted on X (formerly known as Twitter) just hours before the storm hit: “A tropical cyclone undergoing explosive intensification unexpectedly on final approach to a major urban area . . . is up there on list of nightmare weather scenarios becoming more likely in a warming #climate.”
Swain is simultaneously 1,600 miles away from the tempest and at the eye of the storm. His ability to explain science to the masses—think the Carl Sagan of weather—has made him one of the media’s go-to climate experts. He’s a staff research scientist at UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability who spends more than 1,100 hours each year on public-facing climate and weather communication, explaining whether (often, yes) and how climate change is raising the number and exacerbating the viciousness of weather disasters. “I’m a physical scientist, but I not only study how the physics and thermodynamics of weather evolve but how they affect people,” says Swain. “I lead investigations into how extreme events like floods and droughts and wildfires are changing in a warming climate, and what we might do about it.”
He translates that science to everyday people, even as the number of weather-disaster headlines grows each year. “To be quite honest, it’s nerve-racking,” says Swain. “There’s such a demand. But there’s a climate emergency, and we need climate scientists to talk to the world about it.”
No bells, no whistles. No fancy clothes, makeup, or vitriolic speech. Sometimes he doesn’t even shave for the camera. Just a calm, matter-of-fact voice talking about science on the radio, online, on TV. In 2023, he gave nearly 300 media interviews—sometimes at midnight or in his car. The New York Times, CNN, and BBC keep him on speed dial. Social media is Swain’s home base. His Weather West blog reaches millions. His weekly Weather West “office hours” on YouTube are public and interactive, doubling as de facto press conferences. His tweets reach 40 million people per year. “I don’t think that he appreciates fully how influential he is of the public understanding of weather events, certainly in California but increasingly around the world,” says Stanford professor of earth system science Noah Diffenbaugh, ’96, MS ’97, Swain’s doctoral adviser and mentor. “He’s such a recognizable presence in newspapers and radio and television. Daniel’s the only climate scientist I know who’s been able to do that.”
There’s no established job description for climate communicator—what Swain calls himself—and no traditional source of funding. He’s not particularly a high-energy person, nor is he naturally gregarious; in fact, he has a chronic medical condition that often saps his energy. But his work is needed, he says. “Climate change is an increasingly big part of what’s driving weather extremes today,” Swain says. “I connect the dots between the two. There’s a lot of misunderstanding about how a warming climate affects day-to-day variations in weather, but my goal is to push public perception toward what the science actually says.” So when reporters call him, he does his best to call them back.
7:30 a.m., winds at 5 mph from the east northeast
Swain finishes the phone call with the Times reporter and schedules a Zoom interview with Reuters for noon. Then he brushes his teeth. He’s used to a barrage of requests when there’s a catastrophic weather event. Take August 2020, when, over three days, California experienced 14,000 lightning strikes from “dry” thunderstorms. More than 650 reported wildfires followed, eventually turning the skies over San Francisco a dystopian orange. “In a matter of weeks, I did more than 100 interviews with television, radio, and newspaper outlets, and walked a social media audience of millions through the disaster unfolding in their own backyards,” he wrote in a recent essay for Nature.
Swain’s desire to understand the physics of weather stretches back to his preschool years. In 1993, his family moved from San Francisco across the Golden Gate Bridge to San Rafael, and the 4-year-old found himself wondering where all that Bay City fog had gone. Two years later, Swain spent the first big storm of his life under his parents’ bed. He lay listening to screeching 100 mile-per-hour winds around his family’s home, perched on a ridge east of Mount Tamalpais. But he was more excited than scared. The huge winter storm of 1995 that blew northward from San Francisco and destroyed the historic Conservatory of Flowers just got 6-year-old Swain wired.
‘Climate change is an increasingly big part of what’s driving weather extremes today. I connect the dots between the two.’
“To this day, it’s the strongest winds I’ve ever experienced,” he says. “It sent a wind tunnel through our house.” It broke windows. Shards of glass embedded in one of his little brother’s stuffies, which was sitting in an empty bedroom. “I remember being fascinated,” he says. So naturally, when he got a little older, he put a weather station on top of that house. And then, in high school, he launched his Weather West blog. “It was read by about 10 people,” Swain says, laughing. “I was a weather geek. It didn’t exactly make me popular.” Two decades, 550 posts, and 2 million readers later, well, who’s popular now?
Swain graduated from UC Davis with a bachelor’s degree in atmospheric science. He knew then that something big was happening on the weather front, and he wanted to understand how climate change was influencing the daily forecast. So at Stanford, he studied earth system science and set about using physics to understand the causes of changing North Pacific climate extremes. “From the beginning, Daniel had a clear sense of wanting to show how climate change was affecting the weather conditions that matter for people,” says Diffenbaugh. “A lot of that is extreme weather.” Swain focused on the causes of persistent patterns in the atmosphere—long periods of drought or exceptionally rainy winters—and how climate change might be exacerbating them.
The first extreme weather event he studied was the record-setting California drought that began in 2012. He caught the attention of both the media and the scientific community after he coined the term Ridiculously Resilient Ridge, referring to a persistent ridge of high pressure caused by unusual oceanic warmth in the western tropical Pacific Ocean. That ridge was blocking weather fronts from bringing rain into California. The term was initially tongue-in-cheek. Today the Ridiculously Resilient Ridge (aka RRR or Triple R) has a Wikipedia page.
“One day, I was sitting in my car, waiting to pick up one of my kids, reading the news on my phone,” says Diffenbaugh. “And I saw this article in the Economist about the drought. It mentioned this Ridiculously Resilient Ridge. I thought, ‘Oh, wow, that’s interesting. That’s quite a branding success.’ I click on the page and there’s a picture of Daniel Swain.”
Diffenbaugh recommended that Swain write a scientific paper about the Ridiculously Resilient Ridge, and Swain did, in 2014. By then, the phrase was all over the internet. “Journalists started calling while I was still at Stanford,” says Swain. “I gave into it initially, and the demand just kept growing from there.”
11:45 a.m., precipitation 0 inches
Swain’s long, lanky frame is seated ramrod straight in front of his computer screen, scrolling for the latest updates about Hurricane Otis. At noon, he signs in to Zoom and starts answering questions again.
Reuters: “Hurricane Otis wasn’t in the forecast until about six to 10 hours before it occurred. What would you say were the factors that played into its fierce intensification?”
Swain: “Tropical cyclones, or hurricanes, require a few different ingredients. I think the most unusual one was the warmth of water temperature in the Pacific Ocean off the west coast of Mexico. It’s much higher than usual. This provided a lot of extra potential intensity to this storm. We expect to see increases in intensification of storms like this in a warming climate.”
Swain’s dog, Luna, bored by the topic, snores softly. She’s asleep just behind him, next to a bookshelf filled with weather disaster titles: The Terror by Dan Simmons; The Water Will Come by Jeff Goodell; Fire Weather by John Vaillant. And the deceptively hopeful-sounding Paradise by Lizzie Johnson, which tells the story of the 2018 Camp Fire that burned the town of Paradise, Calif., to the ground. Swain was interviewed by Johnson for the book. The day of the fire, he found himself glued to the comment section of his blog, warning anyone who asked about evacuation to get out.
“During the Camp Fire, people were commenting, ‘I’m afraid. What should we do? Do we stay or do we go?’ Literally life or death,” he says. He wrote them back: “There is a huge fire coming toward you very fast. Leave now.” As they fled, they sent him progressively more horrifying images of burning homes and trees like huge, flaming matchsticks. “This makes me extremely uncomfortable—that I was their best bet for help,” says Swain.
Swain doesn’t socialize much. He doesn’t have time. His world revolves around his home life, his work, and taking care of his health. He has posted online about his chronic health condition, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a heritable connective tissue disease that, for him, results in fatigue, gastrointestinal problems, and injuries—he can partially dislocate a wrist mopping the kitchen floor. He works to keep his health condition under control when he has down time, traveling to specialists in Utah, taking medications and supplements, and being cautious about any physical activity. When he hikes in the Colorado Rocky Mountains, he’s careful and tries to keep his wobbly ankles from giving out. Doctors don’t have a full understanding of EDS. So, Swain researches his illness himself, much like he does climate science, constantly looking for and sifting through new data, analyzing it, and sometimes sharing what he discovers online with the public. “If it’s this difficult to parse even as a professional scientist and science communicator, I can only imagine how challenging this task is for most other folks struggling with complex/chronic illnesses,” he wrote on Twitter.
‘“There is a huge fire coming toward you very fast. Leave now.” This makes me extremely uncomfortable—that I was their best bet for help. ’
It helps if he can exert some control over his own schedule to minimize fatigue. The virtual world has helped him do that. He mostly works from a small, extra bedroom in an aging rental home perched at an elevation of 5,400 feet in Boulder, where he lives with his partner, Jilmarie Stephens, a research scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder.
When Swain was hired at UCLA in 2018, Peter Kareiva, the then director of the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, supported a nontraditional career path that would allow Swain to split his time between research and climate communication, with the proviso that he find grants to fund much of his work. That same year, Swain was invited to join a group at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) located in Boulder, which has two labs located at the base of the Rocky Mountains.
“Daniel had a very clear vision about how he wanted to contribute to science and the world, using social media and his website,” says Kareiva, a research professor at UCLA. “We will not solve climate change without a movement, and communication and social media are key to that. Most science papers are never even read. What we do as scientists only matters if it has an impact on the world. We need at least 100 more Daniels.”
And yet financial support for this type of work is never assured. In a recent essay in Nature, Swain writes about what he says is a desperate need for more institutions to fund climate communication by scientists. “Having a foot firmly planted in both research and public-engagement worlds has been crucial,” he writes. “Even as I write this, it’s unclear whether there will be funding to extend my present role beyond the next six months.”
4:00 p.m., 67 degrees F
“Ready?” says the NBC reporter on the computer screen. “Can we just have you count to 10, please?”
“Walk me through in a really concise way why we saw this tropical storm, literally overnight, turn into a Category 5 hurricane, when it comes to climate change,” the reporter says.
“So, as the Earth warms, not only does the atmosphere warm or air temperatures increase, but the oceans are warming as well. And because warm tropical oceans are hurricane fuel, the maximum potential intensity of hurricanes is set by how warm the oceans are,” Swain says.
An hour later, Swain lets Luna out and prepares for the second half of his day: He’ll spend the next five hours on a paper for a science journal. It’s a review of research on weather whiplash in California—the phenomenon of rapid swings between extremes, such as the 2023 floods that came on the heels of a severe drought. Using atmospheric modeling, Swain predicted in a 2018 Nature Climate Change study that there would be a 25 percent to 100 percent increase in extreme dry-to-wet precipitation events in the years ahead. Recent weather events support that hypothesis, and Swain’s follow-up research analyzes the ways those events are seriously stressing California’s water storage and flood control infrastructure.
“What’s remarkable about this summer is that the record-shattering heat has occurred not only over land but also in the oceans,” Swain explained in an interview with Katie Couric on YouTube in August, “like the hot tub [temperature] water in certain parts of the shallow coastal regions off the Gulf of Mexico.” In a warming climate, the atmosphere acts as a kitchen sponge, he explains later. It soaks up water but also wrings it out. The more rapid the evaporation, the more intense the precipitation. When it rains, there are heavier downpours and more extreme flood events.
‘What we do as scientists only matters if it has an impact on the world. We need at least 100 more Daniels.’
“It really comes down to thermodynamics,” he says. The increasing temperatures caused by greenhouse gases lead to more droughts, but they also cause more intense precipitation. The atmosphere is thirstier, so it takes more water from the land and from plants. The sponge holds more water vapor. That’s why California is experiencing these wild alternations, he says, from extremely dry to extremely wet. “It explains the role climate change plays in turning a tropical storm overnight into hurricane forces,” he says.
October 26, expected high of 45 degrees F
In 2023, things got “ludicrously crazy” for both Swain and the world. It was the hottest year in recorded history. Summer temperatures broke records worldwide. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported 28 confirmed weather/climate disaster events with losses exceeding $1 billion—among them a drought, four flooding events, 19 severe storm events, two tropical cyclones, and a killer wildfire. Overall, catastrophic weather events resulted in the deaths of 492 people in the United States. “Next year may well be worse than that,” Swain says. “It’s mind-blowing when you think about that.”
“There have always been floods and wildfires, hurricanes and storms,” Swain continues. “It’s just that now, climate change plays a role in most weather disasters”—pumped-up storms, more intense and longer droughts and wildfire seasons, and heavier rains and flooding. It also plays a role in our ability to manage those disasters, Swain says. In a 2023 paper he published in Communications Earth & Environment, for example, he provides evidence that climate change is shifting the ideal timing of prescribed burns (which help mitigate wildfire risk) from spring and autumn to winter.
The day after Hurricane Otis strikes, Swain’s schedule has calmed down, so he takes time to make the short drive from his home up to the NCAR Mesa Lab, situated in a majestic spot where the Rocky Mountains meet the plains. Sometimes he’ll sit in his Hyundai in the parking lot, looking out his windshield at the movements of the clouds while doing media interviews on his cell phone. Today he scrolls through weather news updates on the aftermath of Hurricane Otis, keeping informed for the next interview that pops up, or his next blog post. In total, 52 people will be reported dead due to the disaster. The hurricane destroyed homes and hotels, high-rises and hospitals. Swain’s name will appear in at least a dozen stories on Hurricane Otis, including one by David Wallace-Wells, an opinion writer for the New York Times,columnist for the New York Times Magazine,and bestselling author of The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. “It’s easy to get pulled into overly dramatic ways of looking at where the world is going,” says Wallace-Wells, who routinely listens to Swain’s office hours and considers him a key source when he needs information on weather events. “Daniel helps people know how we can better calibrate those fears with the use of scientific rigor. He’s incredibly valuable.”
From the parking lot in the mountains, Swain often watches the weather that blows across the wide-open plains that stretch for hundreds of miles, all the way to the Mississippi River. He never tires of examining weather in real time, learning from it. He studies the interplay between the weather and the clouds at this spot where storms continually roll in and roll out.
“After all these years,” he says, “I’m still a weather geek.”
We are told that 2030 is a significant year for global sustainability targets. What could we really achieve comprehensively from now until then, especially with climate change dominating so many discussions and proposals?
More sustainable transport on water and land, with many advantages beyond tackling climate change (Leeuwarden, the Netherlands). Source: Photo Taken by Ilan Kelman
Several United Nations agreements use 2030 for their timeframe, including the Sustainable Development Goals, the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, the Paris Agreement for tackling human-caused climate change, and the Addis Ababa Action Agenda on Financing for Development. Aside from the oddity of having separate agreements with separate approaches from separate agencies to achieve similar goals, climate change is often explicitly separated as a topic. Yet it brings little that is new to the overall and fundamental challenges causing our sustainability troubles.
Consider what would happen if tomorrow we magically reached exactly zero greenhouse gas emissions. Overfishing would continue unabated through what is termed illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing, often in protected areas such as Antarctic waters. Demands from faraway markets would still devastate nearshore marine habitats and undermine local practices serving local needs.
Deforestation would also continue. Examples are illegal logging in protected areas of Borneo and slashing-and-burning through the Amazon’s rainforest, often to plant products for supermarket shelves appealing to affluent populations. Environmental exploitation and ruination did not begin with, and is not confined to, climate change.
A similar ethos persists for human exploitation. No matter how awful the harm, human trafficking, organ harvesting, child marriage, child labour, female genital mutilation, and arms deals would not end with greenhouse gas emissions.
If we solved human-caused climate change, then humanity—or, more to the point, certain sectors of humanity—would nonetheless display horrible results in wrecking people and ecosystems. It comes from a value favouring immediate exploitation of any resource without worrying about long-term costs. It sits alongside the value of choosing to live out of balance with the natural environment from local to global scales.
These are exactly the same values causing the climate to change quickly and substantively due to human activity. In effect, it is about using fossil fuels as a resource as rapidly as possible, irrespective of the negative social and environmental consequences.
Changing these values represents the fundamental challenge. Doing so ties together all the international efforts and agreements.
The natural environment, though, does not exist in isolation from us. Human beings have never been separate from nature, even when we try our best to divorce society from the natural environments around us. Our problematic values are epitomised by seeing nature as being at our service, different or apart from humanity.
Human-caused climate change is one symptom among many of such unsustainable and destructive values. Referring to the “climate crisis” or “climate emergency” is misguided since similar crises and emergencies manifest for similar reasons, including overfishing, deforestation, human exploitation, and an industry selling killing devices.
The real crisis and the real emergency are certain values. These values lead to behaviour and actions which are the antithesis of what the entire 2030 agenda aims to achieve. We do a disservice to ourselves and our place in the environment by focusing on a single symptom, such as human-caused climate change.
Revisiting our values entails seeking fundaments for what we seek for 2030—and, more importantly, beyond. One of our biggest losses is in caring: caring for ourselves and for people and environments. Dominant values promote inward-looking, short-term thinking for action yielding immediate, superficial, and short-lived gains.
We ought to pivot sectors with these values toward caring about the long-term future, caring for people, caring for nature, and especially caring for ourselves—all of us—within and connected to nature. A caring pathway to 2030 is helpful, although we also need an agenda mapping out a millennium (and more) beyond this arbitrary year. Rather than using “social capital” and “natural capital” to define people and the environment, and rather than treating our skills and efforts as commodities, our values must reflect humanity, caring, integration with nature, and many other underpinning aspects.
When we fail to do so, human-caused climate change demonstrates what manifests, but it is only a single example from many. Placing climate change on a pedestal as the dominant or most important topic distracts from the depth and breadth required to identify problematic values and then morph them into constructive ones.
Focusing on the values that cause climate change and all the other ills is a baseline for reaching and maintaining sustainability. Then, we would not only solve human-caused climate change and achieve the 2030 agenda, but we would also address so much more for so much longer.
With the World Stumbling Past 1.5 Degrees of Warming, Scientists Warn Climate Shocks Could Trigger Unrest and Authoritarian Backlash
Most of the public seems unaware that global temperatures will soon push past the target to which the U.N. hoped to limit warming, but researchers see social and psychological crises brewing.
Activists march in protest on day nine of the COP28 Climate Conference on Dec. 9, 2023 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Credit: Sean Gallup/Getty Images
As Earth’s annual average temperature pushes against the 1.5 degree Celsius limit beyond which climatologists expect the impacts of global warming to intensify, social scientists warn that humanity may be about to sleepwalk into a dangerous new era in human history. Research shows the increasing climate shocks could trigger more social unrest and authoritarian, nationalist backlashes.
Established by the 2015 Paris Agreement and affirmed by a 2018 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the 1.5 degree mark has been a cliff edge that climate action has endeavored to avoid, but the latest analyses of global temperature data showed 2023 teetering on that red line.
Paris negotiators were intentionally vague about the endeavor to limit warming to 1.5 degrees, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change put the goal in the context of 30-year global averages. Earlier this month, the Berkeley Earth annual climate report showed Earth’s average temperature in 2023 at 1.54 degrees Celsius above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial average, marking the first step past the target.
“The real danger is that there are so many other crises around us that there is no effort left for the climate crisis,” he said. “We will find all kinds of reasons not to put more effort into climate protection, because we are overburdened with other things like inflation and wars all around us.”
Steurer said he doesn’t expect any official announcement from major climate institutions until long after the 1.5 degree threshold is actually crossed, when some years will probably already be edging toward 2 degrees Celsius. “I think most scientists recognize that 1.5 is gone,” he said.
“We’ll be doing this for a very long time,” he added, “not accepting facts, pretending that we are doing a good job, pretending that it’s not going to be that bad.”
In retrospect, using the 1.5 degree temperature rise as the key metric of whether climate action was working may have been a bad idea, he said.
“It’s language nobody really understands, unfortunately, outside of science,” he said. ”You always have to explain that 1.5 means a climate we can adapt to and manage the consequences, 2 degrees of heating is really dangerous, and 3 means collapse of civilization.”
Absent any formal notification of breaching the 1.5 goal, he hopes more scientists talk publicly about worst-case outcomes.
“It would really make a difference if scientists talked more about societal collapse and how to prepare for that because it would signal, now it’s getting real,” he said. “It’s much more tangible than 1.5 degrees.”
Instead, recent public climate discourse was dominated by feel-good announcements about how COP28 kept the 1.5 goal alive, he added.
“This is classic performative politics,” he said. “If the fossil fuel industry can celebrate the outcome of the COP, that’s not a good sign.”
Like many social scientists, Steurer is worried that the increasingly severe climate shocks that warming greater than 1.5 degrees brings will reverberate politically as people reach for easy answers.
“That is usually denial, in particular when it comes to right-wing parties,” he said. “That’s the easiest answer you can find.”
“Global warming will be catastrophic sooner or later, but for now, denial works,” he said. “And that’s all that matters for the next election.”
‘Fear, Terror and Anxiety’
Social policy researcher Paul Hoggett, professor emeritus at the University of the West of England in Bristol, said the scientific roots of 1.5-degree target date back to research in the early 2000s that culminated in a University of Exeter climate conference at which scientists first spelled out the risks of triggering irreversible climate tipping points above that level of warming.
“I think it’s still seen very much as that key marker of where we move from something which is incremental, perhaps to something which ceases to be incremental,” he said. “But there’s a second reality, which is the reality of politics and policymaking.”
The first reality is “profoundly disturbing,” but in the political world, 1.5 is a symbolic maker, he said.
“It’s more rhetorical; it’s a narrative of 1.5,” he said, noting the disconnect of science and policy. “You almost just shrug your shoulders. As the first reality worsens, the political and cultural response becomes more perverse.”
A major announcement about breaching the 1.5 mark in today’s political and social climate could be met with extreme denial in a political climate marked by “a remorseless rise of authoritarian forms of nationalism,” he said. “Even an announcement from the Pope himself would be taken as just another sign of a global elite trying to pull the wool over our eyes.”
An increasing number of right-wing narratives simply see this as a set of lies, he added.
“I think this is a huge issue that is going to become more and more important in the coming years,” he said. “We’re going backwards to where we were 20 years ago, when there was a real attempt to portray climate science as misinformation,” he said. “More and more right wing commentators will portray what comes out of the IPCC, for example, as just a pack of lies.”
The IPCC’s reports represent a basic tenet of modernity—the idea that there is no problem for which a solution cannot be found, he said.
“Even an announcement from the Pope himself would be taken as just another sign of a global elite trying to pull the wool over our eyes.”
“However, over the last 100 years, this assumption has periodically been put to the test and has been found wanting,” Hoggett wrote in a 2023 paper. The climate crisis is one of those situations with no obvious solution, he wrote.
“Those are crucial political and individual emotions,” he said. “And it’s those things that drive this non-rational refusal to see what’s in front of your eyes.”
“At times of such huge uncertainty, a veritable plague of toxic public feelings can be unleashed, which provide the effective underpinning for political movements such as populism, authoritarianism, and totalitarianism,” he said.
“When climate reality starts to get tough, you secure your borders, you secure your own sources of food and energy, and you keep out the rest of them. That’s the politics of the armed lifeboat.”
The Emotional Climate
“I don’t think people like facing things they can’t affect,” said psychotherapist Rebecca Weston, co-president of the Climate Psychology Alliance of North America. “And in trauma, people do everything that they possibly can to stop feeling what is unbearable to feel.”
That may be one reason why the imminent breaching of the 1.5 degree limit may not stir the public, she said.
“We protect ourselves from fear, we protect ourselves from deep grief on behalf of future generations and we protect ourselves from guilt and shame. And I think that the fossil fuel industry knows that,” she said. “We can be told something over and over and over again, but if we have an identity and a sense of ourselves tied up in something else, we will almost always refer to that, even if it’s at the cost of pretending that something that is true is not true.”
Such deep disavowal is part of an elaborate psychological system for coping with the unbearable. “It’s not something we can just snap our fingers and get ourselves out of,” she said.
People who point out the importance of the 1.5-degree warming limit are resented because they are intruding on peoples’ psychological safety, she said, and they become pariahs. “The way societies enforce this emotionally is really very striking,” she added.
But how people will react to passing the 1.5 target is hard to predict, Weston said.
“I do think it revolves around the question of agency and the question of meaning in one’s life,” she said. “And I think that’s competing with so many other things that are going on in the world at the same time, not coincidentally, like the political crises that are happening globally, the shift to the far right in Europe, the shift to the far right in the U.S. and the shift in Argentina.”
Those are not unrelated, she said, because a lack of agency produces a yearning for false, exclusionary solutions and authoritarianism.
“If there’s going to be something that keeps me up at night, it’s not the 1.5. It’s the political implications of that feeling of helplessness,” she said. “People will do an awful lot to avoid feeling helpless. That can mean they deny the problem in the first place. Or it could mean that they blame people who are easier targets, and there is plenty of that to witness happening in the world. Or it can be utter and total despair, and a turning inward and into a defeatist place.”
She said reaching the 1.5 limit will sharpen questions about addressing the problem politically and socially.
“I don’t think most people who are really tracking climate change believe it’s a question of technology or science,” she said. “The people who are in the know, know deeply that these are political and social and emotional questions. And my sense is that it will deepen a sense of cynicism and rage, and intensify the polarization.”
Unimpressed by Science
Watching the global temperature surging past the 1.5 degree mark without much reaction from the public reinforces the idea that the focus on the physical science of climate change in recent decades came at the expense of studying how people and communities will be affected and react to global warming, said sociologist and author Dana Fisher, a professor in the School of International Service at American University and director of its Center for Environment, Community, and Equity.
“It’s a fool’s errand to continue down that road right now,” she said. “It’s been an abysmal ratio of funds that are going to understand the social conflict that’s going to come from climate shocks, the climate migration and the ways that social processes will have to shift. None of that has been done.”
Passing the 1.5 degree threshold will “add fuel to the fire of the vanguard of the climate movement,” she said. “Groups that are calling for systemic change, that are railing against incremental policy making and against business as usual are going to be empowered by this information, and we’re going to see those people get more involved and be more confrontational.”
“When you see a big cycle of activism growing, you get a rise in counter-movements, particularly as activism becomes more confrontational, even if it’s nonviolent, like we saw during the Civil Rights period,” she said. “And it will lead to clashes.”
Looking at the historic record, she said, shows that repressive crackdowns on civil disobedience is often where the violence starts. There are signs that pattern will repeat, with police raids and even pre-emptive arrests of climate activists in Germany, and similar repressive measures in the United Kingdom and other countries.
“I think that’s an important story to talk about, that people are going to push back against climate action just as much as they’re going to push for it,” she said. “There are those that are going to feel like they’re losing privileged access to resources and funding and subsidies.”
“When you see a big cycle of activism growing, you get a rise in counter-movements, particularly as activism becomes more confrontational, even if it’s nonviolent, like we saw during the Civil Rights period.”
A government dealing effectively with climate change would try to deal with that by making sure there were no clear winners and losers, she said, but the climate shocks that come with passing the 1.5 degree mark will worsen and intensify social tensions.
“There will be more places where you can’t go outside during certain times of the year because of either smoke from fires, or extreme heat, or flooding, or all the other things that we know are coming,” she said. “That’s just going to empower more people to get off their couches and become activists.”
‘A Life or Death Task For Humanity’
Public ignorance of the planet’s passing the 1.5 degree mark depends on “how long the powers-that-be can get away with throwing up smokescreens and pretending that they are doing something significant,” said famed climate researcher James Hansen, who recently co-authored a paper showing that warming is accelerating at a pace that will result in 2 degrees of warming within a couple of decades.
“As long as they can maintain the 1.5C fiction, they can claim that they are doing their job,” he said. “They will keep faking it as long as the scientific community lets them get away with it.”
But even once the realization of passing 1.5 is widespread, it might not change the social and political responses much, said Peter Kalmus, a climate scientist and activist in California.
“Not enough people care,” he said. “I’ve been a climate activist since 2006. I’ve tried so many things, I’ve had so many conversations, and I still don’t know what it will take for people to care. Maybe they never will.”
Hovering on the brink of this important climate threshold has left Kalmus feeling “deep frustration, sadness, helplessness, and anger,” he said. “I’ve been feeling that for a long time. Now, though, things feel even more surreal, as we go even deeper into this irreversible place, seeming not to care.”
“No one really knows for sure, but it may still be just physically possible for Earth to stay under 1.5C,” he said, “if humanity magically stopped burning fossil fuels today. But we can’t stop fossil fuels that fast even if everyone wanted to. People would die. The transition takes preparation.”
And there are a lot of people who just don’t want to make that transition, he said.
“We have a few people with inordinate power who actively want to continue expanding fossil fuels,” he said. “They are the main beneficiaries of extractive capitalism; billionaires, politicians, CEOs, lobbyists and bankers. And the few people who want to stop those powerful people haven’t figured out how to get enough power to do so.”
Kalmus said he was not a big fan of setting a global temperature threshold to begin with.
“For me it’s excruciatingly clear that every molecule of fossil fuel CO2 or methane humanity adds to the atmosphere makes irreversible global heating that much worse, like a planet-sized ratchet turning molecule by molecule,” he said. “I think the target framing lends itself to a cycle of procrastination and failure and target moving.”
Meanwhile, climate impacts will continue to worsen into the future, he said.
“There is no upper bound, until either we choose to end fossil fuels or until we simply aren’t organized enough anymore as a civilization to burn much fossil fuel,” he said. “I think it’s time for the movement to get even more radical. Stopping fossil-fueled global heating is a life-or-death task for humanity and the planet, just most people haven’t realized it yet.”
Bob Berwyn an Austria-based reporter who has covered climate science and international climate policy for more than a decade. Previously, he reported on the environment, endangered species and public lands for several Colorado newspapers, and also worked as editor and assistant editor at community newspapers in the Colorado Rockies.
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