Denial

Faced with the predictions of the impacts of global warming on our society, the most natural and easiest answer is denial. Some deny the fact itself that global warming is happening, or the scientific consensus that it is almost certainly caused by human emissions of green-house gases. Other recognize the overwhelming evidence, but find a variety of reasons not to act (to quote Mark Lynas: "I am not the main cause of this problem", "nothing I do makes much difference", "It is too difficult for me to change my behavior", etc...), which is a more subtle form of denial. Mark Lynas pushes the analysis even further:

"In a wider sense, one could argue that the whole economic system of modern Western society is founded on denial, in particular the denial of resource limitations. Schoolchildren are taught - and Nobel Prize-winning economics professors apparently still believe - that Earth-provided resources, from iron ore to fisheries, come into the category of "free goods", appearing as if by magic at the start of the economic process. These free goods, which include all the ecosystem services that support the human species, are considered financially valueless and left out of conventional economic accounting. The standard gross domestic product (GDP) measuring stick of national economic success totals up the values of production and consumption without considering the sustainability of the process. In a master stroke of creative accounting, conventional economic theory therefore counts the depletion of resources as an accumulation of wealth. This logic is analogous to individuals spending all of the money in their current account and counting it as income - an absurdity, but one that underpins our entire economy.
Bearing this societal dysfunction in mind, it is perhaps rather unfair to blame individuals for not facing up to climate change when the whole weight of economy and society effectively prevents them from doing so. Bob Dylan once sang about how the white Southerner who shot the black civil rights leader Medgar Evers in 1963 was "just a pawn in their game". So are we all, pawns in the game of global warming. But we are not entirely powerless, nor entirely blameless. The collective hand that moves these pawns is our own."

Mark Lynas, Six degrees - our future on a hotter planet, chapter "Choosing our future".

So there is no excuse not to act! We have some powerful tools to affect the collective hand: our votes, and our consumption patterns.

fatalism or radicalism?

"According to sophisticated computer modeling of future rates of climate change, we do have a short time left to cut back emissions in order to avoid "dangerous" levels of warming, and can still aim for a "safe landing" within the one-to-two-degree corridor. This window of opportunity is very nearly closed, however. My conclusion in this book, one that is supported by the 2007 IPCC report, is that we have less than a decade remaining to peak and begin cutting global emissions. This is an urgent timetable, but not an impossible one. It seems to me that the dire situation that we find ourselves in argues not for fatalism, but for radicalism."

Mark Lynas, Six degrees - our future on a hotter planet, chapter "Choosing our future".

His last sentence reminds me of the answer of Nicolas Hulot to critics of his movie Le syndrôme du Titanic: "Ce n'est pas moi qui me radicalise, c'est la situation!" (tentative translation: "I am not becoming radical, the situation is!").

It does not seem to me that the agreement reached at the Copenhagen Climate Conference is radical enough. Will the world be able to react in time? The next decade will tell us...

Actively resisting

Six degrees by Mark Lynas is the most poignant wake-up call for humanity about fighting global warming that I have read so far. Sometimes it sounds like science fiction, as the possible consequences of a runaway global warming are almost beyond imagination. But it is all based on hard science (Mark Lynas does not invent anything, he draws everything from the scientific litterature), from the state-of-the-art computer projections to the lessons from the past buried in sediments and ice cores.

I would like to reproduce here his vivid conclusion for his chapter "six degrees", as a reminder of what is at stake at the on-going Copenhagen conference.

"Extreme global warming may not be a survival crisis for humanity as a species, but it will certainly be a survival crisis for most humans unfortunate enough to inhabit a rapidly warming planet, and that situation is surely bad enough. Stalin was wrong to say that a million deaths is merely a statistic; that is one of the reasons why he is still hated today. Every human death, of every baby, every mother, every brother, father, or sister, will be a unique tragedy about which the whole world should grieve - not the least because such an outcome is still today avoidable. [...]
So far as we yet know, Earth is the only planet in the entire universe that has summoned forth life in all its brilliance and variety. To knowingly cut this flowering short is undoubtedly a crime, one more unspeakable even than the cruelest genocide or most destructive war. If each person is uniquely valuable, each species is surely more so. I can see no excuses for collaborating in such a crime. As the postwar Nuremberg trials established, ignorance is no defense, nor is merely following orders. To me the moral path lies not in passively accepting our destructive role, but in actively resisting such a horrendous fate.
As I stated at the beginning of this book, nothing in the future is set in stone. We still have the power - though it diminishes every day - to alter te ending of this terrible drama. It need not yet end in tragedy, and to make this point more clearly the next and final chapter will examine our options for avoiding each successive degree rise in temperature. There, and only there, hope lies.
As Dylan Thomas wrote:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

Climate models

Although I often criticize numerical models, since they often don't manage to reproduce correctly the observations I am working on, I have to recognize the following statement by Mark Lynas:

"Nevertheless, many skeptics base their objections on the suspicion that models are somehow fiddled in advance to come up with the "right answers" by scientists eager for the next global warming grant - "you get out what you put in", as the old adage goes. But climate models do have an important grounding: they are based not on subjective judgments by their constructors but on the fundamental laws of physics. These observable physical laws, governing everything from convection within clouds to the reflectivity of sea ice, cannot be changed by anyone, whatever their politics. After all, models don't do anything magical. All they do is solve physical equations. All the processes of HadCM3, for instance, could theoretically be worked out by hand - except that it would then take centuries of human labor to complete one "model run". What computers do is speed up the process, just as pocket calculators speed up mathematics lessons in school.
No one, however, suggests that models are perfect. They all tend to come out with slightly different answers to the same question, a reflection of their varying design. The reason here is that some of the physical laws that underpin them are not known precisely. How clouds interact with the wider atmosphere is a big uncertainty, for example, so some cloud model parameters are best guesses. Nor is it known exactly how far sulphate "aerosols" - tiny particles of pollution blamed for "global dimming" - cool things down. But models are a useful tool and give a valuable insight into likely future conditions on this planet - something humanity has never had access to before. Unlike the oracles consulted by the ancients, models offer a way of divining the future based not on the miraculous visions of some unseen prophetess but on observable physical data."

Mark Lynas, Six degrees - our future on a hotter planet, chapter "three degrees".

The present task for climate scientists is to improve our understanding of the physical relationships between different processes and parts of the earth system that are still not known precisely, and not well represented in climate models, in order to reduce the uncertainties in the forecasts of our future climate, and check that some neglected processes may not hold big surprises! For example, the IPCC's 2007 report forecasts between 18 and 59 centimeters of sea level rise by 2100, but acknowledges that uncertainties about ice-sheet response time to global warming were not taken into account because the physical processes involved had not yet been studied enough to allow for a reliable assessment of their potential effects. Since the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets contain enough ice for a multi-meter sea level rise, understanding the physical processes controlling ice sheet stability is an urgent scientific question to address, with primordial societal relevance.