Ignoring the shriek calls of Greta Thunberg, the litany of what is wrong with mankind is growing by the day and will soon put the Moore law for semiconductors to shame.
If I had a choice, I would put the precipitous decline of flying insects at the top of the list. This is a very recent and extremely swift phenomenon. I still remember that 20 years ago, a 200 km trip on the highway would fill the windscreen with splotches of diverse sizes, enough to require a regular clean-up at the gas station. Not anymore! Either insects have learned to avoid our roads, which seems very unlikely, or there are just not "there" anymore. Considering their role at the base of the food chain, essential for pollination and soil formation, it is definitively a crisis in need for an urgent answer. But flies and bees are not whales and rhinos. Apparently not cute enough to care in spite of the urgency.
Our mistreatment of the sea should come second. From heavy metals to plastics, the oceans of the world have become our ultimate garbage can. The most remote beaches of the Pacific are now covered with trash of all sorts. Coral Reefs are under assault everywhere and not just from global warming. In many places, there are simply covered and built upon. In other places, overwhelmed by alga explosions triggered by agricultural or urban effluvia. But for most people, the sea is far and vast. It can wait another day. Out of sight, out of mind.
Our terrible land use should come third because it is a slow motion crisis although we have been relentless on this one for the past hundred years. From destroying the rain forest to paving over a growing share of available land. Industrial farming and stock feeding, the assault is multi-faced and extremely destructive, especially in developing countries where population growth easily overwhelm whatever remediation efforts local people may think about.
But these issues are complex to understand, encompass multiple factors and often hard to mobilize people around. Who wants to save mosquitoes or weeds? Ugly deep sea fishes and far away atolls? And what can you do anyway, stuck in the rain in a traffic jam in Stockholm?
CO2, That's the enemy! The reason why Venus is so hot! The obvious culprit of global warming, shrinking ice, rising seas. The one issue among so many on which we should focus! Never mind that it will bankrupt us because energy is by far the most expensive infrastructure we have built and the very last one we want to mess with less the whole edifice of our civilization comes crashing down.
In spite of what we are told, the science behind CO2 and global warming is still very flimsy because the models on which cataclysmic predictions are made, are just that, models, with an almost infinite number of variables. Change any, and the behavior of the systems, the atmosphere but not only, find other equilibriums which are mostly unpredictable whenever they diverge from past behavior.
And that unfortunately is our worst enemy: The past! When it comes to "models" it tells us absolutely nothing at all! The reason here too is complicated but mostly relates to the fact that we do not understand the past. This sounds like a bold assumption but it is a fact.
We can look at tree rings, lake sediments and especially ice cores and reconstruct past climates. This gives us a rather good estimate of what the weather was like at any given time in a specific place. But these measurements are points in space and time, usually not enough to give us more than a fuzzy image of what conditions were like then. But far more importantly, this gives us almost no information on the so important transition periods which would validate or not the models. We are in the dark like the famous scientists variously describing an elephant by looking at its parts. The whole is more than the sum!
So are the models showing us that global warming is an unavoidable consequence of rising CO2 wrong? Maybe not. I don't know and at this stage, nobody really knows. Or at least nobody knows enough to commit all of us to invest trillions of dollars to transform our energy sources from known solutions to unproven and extremely expensive alternatives. From wind and solar which are unreliable energy sources which will oblige us to double the size of the energy infrastructure and treble the price to pipe dreams like fusion, far too complex to become affordable in a reasonable horizon, we have no real, large scale solutions available, except using less energy.
And this should indeed be our focus and it will be until people realize that in the end, having to go on holidays on your bicycle is just downward mobility and a tremendous lowering of living standards. Especially when the Chinese collectively decide that they prefer to keep their cars, Thank you very much!
So what is this new Jeanne d'Arc telling us?
That we are destroying the planet?
(Well, that much we already know, this has not started yesterday!)
And the future of "her" generation?
(polarizing opinions is very much the tune of the day although Trump does it best!)
That we must do something "now"?
(We have heard this for the last 50 years! We have usually from 2 to 10 years to act less doom and darkness fall upon us!)
Whatever the price?
(Replacing fossil fuel by "other" energies will be THE most expensive endeavor of any generation. Probably expensive enough to throw most people into poverty if it is not done properly!)
It is a good thing that most people do not think much beyond what their are fed 24/7 on their screens or they would realize how skewed the message is!
It is true that we are destroying most of the ecosystems on which we rely and that we must do something about it less we face global collapse at some point in the not too distant future. We have known this since the Club of Rome published its rather detailed and far reaching predictions in 1972.
But the very last thing we should focus on first are our energy sources because whatever we decide to do, we will need a lot of energy to achieve it.
Phasing out plastics and replacing them with biodegradable alternatives should not be very difficult but it is not happening because the alternatives are more expensive. Just a little but enough to be non competitive in our market based economies.
Using less land, water and other resources should be a priority too because we are very fast approaching real physical limits and consuming at an accelerated pace whatever is available. This is the well known water lili and pond example where a week before the end, the water lili which double its size every day occupies little more than one per cent of the pond whatever the size. But how do you change "habits" and cultures short of a major shock which in the end obliges people to behave differently?
In reality, it is the very foundations of our consumer society that we need to transform, understanding how intertwined our lives are to the complex ecosystems we are depending on. We cannot live without insects, fishes and animals and these likewise cannot live in degraded environments. So we need to focus on these issues first and foremost. And use whatever energy is needed to transform our behavior. THEN and only then should we focus on transforming our energy sources, less we reduce our ability to adapt as the cost of energy rises.
Whatever fossil fuels are still available, the cleaner the better of course, should be used to facilitate our social transition and change our behaviors first. Atmospheric temperatures rising while we do this will be of little consequences. Nature is resilient. Most species will survive a few degrees more. They have in the past. What they cannot survive is business as usual: The human population explosion, destruction of habitat, over exploitation of resources. Compared to this, CO2 is unimportant.
We do not have 2 years left, nor 10 or 20. We are already overdue for major transformations. The momentum of human society is such that we can only nudge our direction towards a better future. The wrong choices or turns instead of improving out lot could very well mean collapse. There are already signs that we are close to actual limits in many respects. Over fishing, aquifer depletion, soil degradation, etc...which are directly impacting insects, corals and other important part of the earth ecosystems.
We know that in the past, civilizations which were not wiped out by others, crumbled due to over-exploitation of resources or carelessness with their environment (such as Easter Island) or due to climate fluctuations (such as the Maya and the Anasazi, ancestors of the Pueblo people in the South West US) So can we be the first one to show signs of collective intelligence and do, mostly, the right things at the right time?
I tend to be pessimistic on this subject so I am not sure at all. Now is the time for alarm but not for panic. Because the time to do "something" is long gone, we have paradoxically time in front of us. But we must choose wisely. We will need energy to run faster, a lot of it. If all we have is wind power, the boat of out civilization will be over-run by the ecological tsunami we have engendered. This is our collective choice. It is great to listen to the little Nordic Jeanne d'Arc but we need only listen to the warnings, which we should anyway have done long ago. As for the solutions, let's forget about her, she has no clue nor understanding of the complex issues involved, different in developed and developing countries.
In this respect, I think that for once, technology could help us manage the problems is has created. We will need artificial intelligence to understand better how the planet works, build better models and seek complex solutions compatible with human prosperity. That, more than anything else should be the focus of our attention for the years to come so that when time for action comes, we understand better how the global ecosystem can be reoriented and pushed on the right path.
The best image we can use is that of an asteroid coming our way. The sooner we act the better but because we must know what to do less we increase the risk by splitting the asteroid and doubling the effects, we must think very carefully about our actions and their consequences. A shrieking child voice is the very last thing we need to make decisions.
