Joe Romm has put together a blockbuster post that I beg everyone here to read. It is titled, An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts: How We Know Inaction Is the Gravest Threat Humanity Faces, and it lays out the whole smash, a snapshot of our entire devastating climate mess. It begins:

In this post, I will summarize what the recent scientific literature says are the key impacts we face in the coming decades if we stay anywhere near our current emissions path. These include:

• Staggeringly high temperature rise, especially over land — some 10°F over much of the United States
• Permanent Dust Bowl conditions over the U.S. Southwest and many other heavily populated regions around the globe
• Sea level rise of around 1 foot by 2050, then 4 to 6 feet (or more) by 2100, rising some 6 to 12 inches (or more) each decade thereafter
• Massive species loss on land and sea — perhaps 50% or more of all biodiversity
• Unexpected impacts — the fearsome “unknown unknowns”
• Much more extreme weather
• Food insecurity — the increasingly difficulty task of feeding 7 billion, then 8 billion, and then 9 billion people in a world with an ever-worsening climate.
• Myriad direct health impacts

The whole post reads like a script from a dreadful 1960′s science fiction disaster movie. By far, my biggest problem with it is that not only can’t I refute any of it, but the most terrifying facets of our situation — the dual ticking carbon bombs of the permafrost and methane hydrate deposits — aren’t even included. Joe does mention them in the penultimate paragraph and provide a link to more information, before ending his long post with:

We can’t let this happen. It is indeed humanity’s self-destruction. We must pay any price or bear any burden to stop it.

We have arrived at a situation that is almost impossible to comprehend thanks to its towering self-destructiveness and our relentless pursuit of the business as usual path. It’s so bad, in fact, that it’s become almost impossible to talk about it with any degree of frankness and at any appreciable depth and breadth without instantly sounding like a nut case standing on a street corner wearing a “THE END IS NEAR” sandwich board. We have put ourselves in a position where reality has become a truth too awful to be believed by the vast majority of people who don’t follow it obsessively. This is a problem that I confront constantly in reading books about climate change and, more generally, sustainability. The authors (and editors and publishers) know that if they give readers the whole smash and try to introduce them to everything at once, the readers will reject the message and the book itself. As a result, far to many of them “compromise” and tone down the message and often enough tack on some laughably inadequate or utterly impractical “solution” so the book has a happy ending. Presumably they can then sleep well at night by telling themselves that they did their best and it’s much more than other people are doing.

This is the point, for those of you in need of stage directions, where some of you start screaming about how I’m “being alarmist”. If that’s your conclusion, then you desperately need to do more homework on the topic (and anything shoveled in your direction by Fox, Limbaugh, or any of the fossil fuel- or ideology-funded deniers most certainly does not count) and expand your view to encompass many more of the tiles in this vast mosaic. Climate change is the ultimate example of a problem that can only be appreciated with considerable study of not just its basic causes but as many of its knock-on effects as possible. The less narrow and sanitized your view, the more you’ll appreciate the perverse complexity of this challenge and feel urgency and outright terror.

I’ve had more than enough first hand experience with climate communication, from deniers to mainstream consumers and voters who simply didn’t know much more than “global warming is bad and we probably should get around to doing something about it in a few years” to committed greenies, to think there’s a willing audience for the truth. That has been a profoundly disappointing experience. People have repeatedly told me to my face that if the worst effects won’t happen until they’re dead, they don’t care. And in most cases these are people who have children and even grandchildren — yet they’re infinitely more concerned about which SUV or iToy to buy, or which vacation trip to book on the other side of the planet, than how to leave their own descendents a livable world. The moral bankruptcy of that position is breathtaking; it is roughly equivalent to forcing every child on the planet to smoke a pack of cigarettes every day for the rest of his or her life — cigarettes we’re selling at a tidy profit to maintain our preferred lifestyle. The human consequences will be staggering, and they all stem from nothing more or less than our greed and myopia.[1]

Even some of my closest friends, the ones who would be willing to tell me I’ve gone around the bend if that’s what they really thought, have listened to what I’ve told them and followed links I’ve sent them only to conclude, “It’s too awful and too complicated to think about. We’re doomed.” One friend in particular is an engineer and devoted family man, and easily one of the smartest people I know, yet even he blows off the almost universally accepted “80% CO2 reduction by 2050″ guideline as a meaningless goal, as if it’s nothing more than wishful thinking by the hard core greenies.

And while I’m near the topic, let me single out some of my fellow greenies for special criticism. They are effectively among our worst enemies, even though they think they’re fighting the good fight. I say this in part simply because they’re so blindingly inept at talking to newcomers. But a vastly larger problem is the mosaic syndrome — they’re looking at far too few tiles to grasp the interrelated nature of our mess. For example, I’ve repeatedly had to tell people in this group that they’re flat-out wrong when they say that “peak oil is a good thing because it will force us to emit less carbon.”[2] The emergent property of their overly narrow focus is insufficient urgency. Far too many of them think that buying a hybrid and changing their light bulbs and diligently recycling their trash is “doing enough”. That’s a bad joke in the context of the full view of the mess we’ve created over the last 250 years. Once again, I beg you to go read Joe’s post.

And then there are my favorites, the people whom I know are able to comprehend the statistics, the basic feeds and speeds, of climate change, who adamantly refuse to look at them because “it’s too hard” or “it’s too much detail”. They want magic answers, or the problems themselves to evaporate, without their having to invest so much as a tiny fraction of the time and gray cells they burn on computer games or recreational shopping.

So, where does that leave me? With a lot more questions than answers, it seems.

Regular readers here have likely noticed my reduced output on this site in recent weeks. I have not been holed up in the Finger Lakes, sipping a delightful Riesling and holding my wife’s hand as we watch sail boats on Lake Seneca (or Cayuga or …). How I wish it were so. Instead, I’ve been dealing with some issues best left to the mysteries of discretion, and asking my closest advisors, meaning my wife first and foremost, some e-friends, and perhaps most telling of all my tomato and strawberry plants and my myriad (but still wholly inadequate) array of roses, where I go from here. In essence, whether it’s time to give in to the temptation to surrender to the rampant indifference and myopia and selfishness after 8.5 years of trying to smash this boulder with a succession of glass hammers, to join the ranks of those I condemned above, to tell my nieces, in effect, “You’re on your own, guys. We fucked the planet six ways from Sunday, and now it’s up to you to figure out some magic formula to fix it. I’m going back to the joys of woodworking and sipping wine with the most wonderful woman in the world.”

On the other hand, I’ve also been wrestling for perhaps the 5th or 6th time with serious plans for writing a book about this awful situation. The working title of said cheery tome is The Book, sometimes referred to as TBTNTBW (The Book That Needs To Be Written, a reference to all the books that have sugar coated or inadequately covered our climate change challenge). On that front I’ve been organizing the mammoth collection of news articles and reports I’ve assembled since 2003, doing additional research, working on an outline, and building my inner circle of people I can discuss a book project with. (And if you think you get to see an uncomfortable amount of the bizarro inner workings of my psyche on this site, you can’t imagine what’s in store for these people.)

I have no delusions that anyone — not James Hansen, not Bill McKibben, not Joe Romm or Paul Gilding or Heidi Cullen or Gavin Schmidt or Kevin Trenberth or Michael Mann or anyone else you can name — can write a book that will Change Everything. I’m not even convinced anyone can write a book that will make a significant difference. (Pop quiz: Aside “raising awareness”, what has the most famous recent book on environmental issues, An Inconvenient Truth, accomplished to date?) So why would I be enough of an egomaniac to think for a nanosecond that I could pull off this miracle? Well, for one thing, I’m a writer to the core, which means the egomania thing is a given. And for another, I don’t need to find a perfect solution, merely the best one available. And if that still carries a notably low probability of success, well, no one ever guaranteed that being good in absolute terms was a prerequisite for something to be relatively optimal.

I look around and see all the reasons why we “can’t” or “won’t” do what’s necessary to act in our own best interest and those of our kids, and in one form or another they all relate to a lack of urgency born of ignorance, this implicit assumption made by far too many people that climate change is a hoax or at most a minor problem. Even those who run coal and oil companies surely believe, at some level — assuming you could drill or blast your way deeply enough into their minds — that they’re not really contributing to the suffering of billions of human beings in the coming decades just so they can make money. The problem is that the universe is startlingly indifferent to our beliefs; assuming anything else would be akin to firing a gun at a loved one and expecting the bullet to intentionally swerve and strike a wall instead of flesh and bone.

What to do… what to do…

Continue this blog, albeit at this lower volume of output? Yes.

Continue working on The Book? Yes.

Continue looking for alternative ways to make a difference? Of course. The answer to that one is always yes.

[1] If you don’t like the imagery of children being forced to smoke, then let me give you a more sanitized version. In The Long Thaw, David Archer points out that the heat that will accumulate in the biosphere over the long run as a result of burning one gallon of gasoline is 40 million times the useful energy in that amount of fuel. Yes, that’s 4-E-bloody-7 times as much. I’ve yet to hear of a more extreme example of deficit spending.

[2] Think I’m wrong? Ask yourself: If the supply of oil can’t meet desired demand at less than an economy-crushing market price of, say, $500/barrel, then how much interest will there be in ramping up coal to liquids production — which has a hideously high carbon footprint? How much more development of shale oil will there be? And how much more friction will there be between using agricultural productivity for fuel instead of fuel? Peak oil will multiply the woes of climate change, not alleviate them.

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