Climate Change is…More Than A Changing Climate

The term “climate change” is a quick stand-in for me—and probably for a lot of others—that refers not only to the abstract process of climates actually changing (like “heart disease” refers to hearts that have a disease?), but also to a whole world of issues that are subsumed into it. Climate Change is big, literally and figuratively. It has temporal and historical origins, some of which are basic human history, and others of which precede human beings entirely and are literally millions of years in the making. It is a jungle of human causes, it is a slew of physical, chemical, biological, and planetary processes. It is a planet’s worth of effects, and these over the course of the whole foreseeable future—on many time scales. So it is big, and a bit all-encompassing. We throw the term Climate Change around, and I would argue we are being a bit inexact—a bit sloppy—in doing that. Sloppy is okay, but is that sloppiness serving us? Or is it costing us something as well? What do we really mean?

First, in my mind, there’s lower case climate change, and upper case Climate Change. The lower-case version is appropriate whenever the two ideas of “change” and “climate” are related in some way, and can be of general use, as in “increased amounts of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere has caused our climate to change.” Or, “The resulting change in climate experienced by tropical forests is disrupting their productivity.” But this is separate from capitalized Climate Change, which is a specific ongoing historical phenomenon that we are currently experiencing and locked into. It is an event, with a beginning, and a history. We are in the midst of it. We do not know the full course of it because its full course is still being written.

A quick check shows most major media outlets do not capitalize Climate Change, but I think they are wrong not to. It would be like not capitalizing the super bowl. Or the world wars. Or hurricane katrina. I don’t have a problem in principle with changing climates. Who would?

I do have a problem with Climate Change, the modern event, because it is destroying lots of things and we need to slow it down and “disarm” it. When we talk about Climate Change then, do we maybe slip back and forth between referencing, specifically, the changing climate (the known effect which results from accumulating greenhouse gases), and Climate Change (the devastating crisis facing humanity)? I think most of us are more thinking in terms of the later use. In the absence of a different real name or title for this event I think it should be capitalized, and that is what I am doing.

Moving on, Climate Change, the historical event, is characterized by the changing of our planets climate (!). But our climate is only changing because our atmosphere is changing. Specifically, the relative composition of gases in our atmosphere has been changing, increasingly, for 100s of years. This rate of change has accelerated in the last century and especially recent decades, with us now churning out, every year that goes by, volumes of climate warming gases that were inconceivable just 100 years ago. The atmospheric composition is also dynamic, and therefore is continuing to change every fraction of a second of our lives. It will continue to do so after all of us are dead. This is because humanity is doing things that disproportionately put some gases in the atmosphere more than others, and the effects of those additions start immediately and play out over long expanses of time.

Here’s where I talk as if I was an evolutionary biologist or something: It used to be just life—lots of plants and animals—growing, living, breathing, dying, decomposing. The math of the relative abundance of producers (plants) and consumers (animals) apparently managed to keep the gaseous composition of the atmosphere in a place of equilibrium. Not to place a value judgment on this equilibrium per se, but let’s just acknowledge for the moment that this balance was valuable because it was safe and predictable! Life likes stable conditions. Adaptation, specification, diversification and abundance all happen under stable conditions.

Now this one species is just burning burning burning stuff—once-living, organic material—that has been locked up in the ground or oceans for millions of years. The resulting output of gases is not being offset by some other absorption of these gases. Those gases are accumulating up there, like smoke in a burning house. That’s an increase in the animal/consumer/emissions side of the equation. In the meantime, this species has also really decimated the plant/producer/absorber side of the equation by radically converting our original lush vegetative landscapes to relatively carbon poor agricultural and urban ones. We couldn’t have been more effective at changing our atmosphere if we’d tried.

This widespread ambivalence to and/or ignorance of the original balance has always seemed just wrong and tragic to me, but it is more than an aesthetic issue. It is an issue of stability. The changed atmospheric composition, where we now have more carbon dioxide than the planet has seen in 1000s of years (and more methane, and more nitrous oxide, and more small black particulate matter, etc.), acts as a blanket for our planet (relative to cold “outer space,” that we otherwise lose our heat to). Our atmosphere is like a nice transparent greenhouse roof, where light energy comes in, but once inside bounces around so much it becomes trapped, now as a weaker form of energy than light; as heat. More heat means all sorts of things. Air is a sponge for water. Warmer air is a bigger, hungrier sponge: it holds more water when there is water available to absorb, and air dries the land surfaces more when there is not. Warmer air means more energy for wind. And on average, more heat means, well, things are warmer. The term Global Warming isn’t wrong, it just has its own problems as a term for what is going on.

Since we are going from one atmosphere (I drafted this post during the holiday season, so let’s call it the atmosphere of Christmas’ Past) and the climate that it implied, to another atmosphere (the atmosphere of Christmas’ future) and the climate it implies, we are in a period of transition, or change. The era of Climate Change.

It is interesting to note how it would feel different, and how the above description of Climate Change the Event would be different, if we grabbed onto a different point in the chain of cause and effect and called the whole disaster something else, like Atmospheric Modification. Then we would focus our attention more on the creation and long-term stability of our atmosphere’s gaseous composition. We definitely need to do something about Atmospheric Modification. Or what if we called the whole thing Carbon Release (recognizing the role of the conversion of plant bodies and fossil fuels from solids and liquids to gas). There would be some grumbling about the fact that it is more than just carbon we are releasing into the atmosphere, but it would give us a more immediate handle on what we need to stop doing. Or, looking more down the chain of cause and effect, we could call it Ecological Disruption and that might strike more fear in our hearts than the idea of the climate changing a little. We could call it Global Warming, but it would be too easy for naysayers to point out it is still snowing outside (wait…).

Despite the fact that the term Climate Change effectively references way more than just the changing climate, it is just the tip of the iceberg about what people, including myself, are thinking about when we talk about Climate Change. We are also thinking about the energy and land use policies and practices that have caused and continue to exacerbate Climate Change. At some level, we are also thinking about the attitudes that underly the policies and practices that lead to such naive and reckless use of our planet in the first place. And we are thinking about the future consequences of the change. They are all tied together, such that mitigating Climate Change has 1000s of entry points on its many long chains of cause and effect.

All this is to say we know what we mean when we say Climate Change, but mostly intuitively. The more clearly we articulate the many facets that we are talking about, the more we can interface with the problem.

This more human, less mechanistic, face of Climate Change is part two of “Climate Change is…More than a Changing Climate.” Stay tuned :)