Collide-a-scape

This one is from the left, and it was laid out last week by Bill McKibben in a Washington Post op-ed, in advance of the climate protests now underway in Washington DC:

The issue is simple: We want the president to block construction of Keystone XL, a pipeline that would carry oil from the tar sands of northern Alberta down to the Gulf of Mexico. We have, not surprisingly, concerns about potential spills and environmental degradation from construction of the pipeline. But those tar sands are also the second-largest pool of carbon in the atmosphere, behind only the oil fields of Saudi Arabia.

But as Bryan Walsh at Time explains today, the issue is not that simple:

Whatever oil we refuse to buy from Canada will likely just be replaced by politically risky crude from the Middle East or Russia or Venezuela—or perhaps, by environmentally riskier developments in the Niger Delta or the Alaskan Arctic. While blocking the Keystone XL pipeline would slow the development of oil sands, it wouldn’t stop it. Oil is a fungible commodity, and if the price goes high enough—and there’s little reason to expect it wouldn’t—eventually Canada would sell that crude elsewhere, perhaps piping it to the west coast and shipping it to a thirsty China, even if that is more expensive and difficult than simple selling it to the U.S.

Walsh is sympathetic to McKibben and the climate protesters, but he also thinks that their stand on the pipeline is too simplistic:

I worry that the oil sands are going to be burned no matter what Obama does, and it’s wrong to make the pipeline a climate red line for Obama.

Anybody want to venture a guess as to which way President Obama will decide?

At the NYT Green blog, Justin Gillis writes (my emphasis):

Climate scientists have long called for steps to limit the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and they are growing more and more worried about the slow pace of action. Yet their sense of urgency has not permeated society at large, and it certainly does not seem to be influencing the course of events in Washington, where climate legislation stalled last year.

All true.

So if we know that progress on the domestic and international policy fronts is stalled, then this leaves one last option for the climate concerned community: generating a larger “sense of urgency.”

Hence the new report from the San Francisco-based ClimateWorks Foundation that, says Gillis, “does the best job I have seen of explaining, in layman’s terms, why scientists keep pressing the [climate] issue.” The report cuts right to the chase (my emphasis):

The physics of the earth harbor a frightening punch line for the climate change story: Even though the consequences of climate change persist for the very long term, the time to avoid those consequences is very short. A delay — of even a decade —in reducing CO2 emissions will lock in large-scale, irreversible change. Delay also increases the risk that the whole climate system will spin out of control. This message may be alarming, but it is not alarmism; it’s physics. And the earth’s climate physics have serious implications for political action and technological innovation in the coming decade.

So the clock is ticking. But the real punch line–which I’ve bolded below–comes at the end of the report:

ClimateWorks’ goal is to limit annual global greenhouse gas emissions to 44 billion metric tons by the year 2020 (25 percent below business-as-usual projections) and 35 billion metric tons by the year 2030 (50 percent below projections). These ambitious targets require the immediate and widespread adoption of smart energy and land use policies. ClimateWorks and its network of affiliated organizations promote these policies in the regions and sectors responsible for most greenhouse gas emissions.

“Immediate,” as in now? Next week? Next year, or just by 2020? And what does “widespread” mean? I’m kinda thinking it’s another way of saying much of the world.

So what happens if the world is no closer to adopting these ambitious targets by, say, 2015? What if we’re still having the same debates then? What if there is still no sense of urgency permeating society at large?

Does the climate concerned community continue blaming oil companies, “deniers,” and the media for the lack of progress? Do they have a Plan B?

To avert “large-scale, irreversible change,” does ClimateWorks have particular “smart energy and land policies” in mind?

The clock is ticking.

Last week, this provocative interview with Sir David King, who the Guardian calls “one of the most respected figures in climate change policy,” seemed to register not more than a blip. That’s too bad, because here’s some of what he said:

I can’t see the Kyoto protocol making any headway – there are enough blocks in place, especially from the US and China, that it is wholly unlikely that it will go on. We need to be pragmatic…If you say only a full [legally binding] treaty is any good, we will still be arguing about it in 20 years.

Now let’s go to this story in today’s NYT:

The persistent inability of the United Nations to forge international consensus on climate change issues was on display Wednesday, as Security Council members disagreed over whether they should address possible instability provoked by problems like rising sea levels or competition over water resources.

When will leading climate pundits and climate negotiators get beyond all the  politics and noise and just admit that another kind of persistent blocking pattern is the major reason why international climate policy is forever stalled?

An intellectually bankrupt, marginalized social movement with an expired shelf life is at a crossroads. (Metaphor mix alert!)

On Saturday, a Guardian article asked:

Has the green movement lost its way?

True, we have heard this tune before. This time, however, there is mounting evidence that more charter members of the club are at last recognizing that contemporary environmentalism is in a protracted death spiral.

In her Guardian piece, Susanna Lustin uses the recent conversion of former green activist Mark Lynas (the latest heretic?) to explore the case for a curdled enviro movement, a thesis summed up here in the article’s subhead:

Anti-nuclear, anti-capitalist, anti-flying: the green movement may have alienated more people than it has won over, and there are now calls for a new kind of environmentalism.

What would that entail? Well, here’s Lynas in a weekend opinion piece published elsewhere:

Solving many of the world’s most critical environmental challenges will, in some cases, involve doing the exact opposite of what most environmentalists want.

Rather than retreating into hair-shirt austerity, I believe that, just as technology got us into this mess, technology is vital to get us out of it.

That means embracing some things that will make a lot of Green believers choke on their organic muesli.

It has taken me a long time to reach this conclusion. I used to passionately oppose not only nuclear power but GM crops. I once even threw a pie in the face of a Danish scientist who dared to question the orthodox environmental line. So what changed?

Through research, I found that much of what I believed about environmental issues had little, if any, basis  in science. Put simply, though my  concerns were right, my solutions were wrong.

Some–especially climate skeptics–will likely see a contradiction in that last sentence and might argue that his “concerns” also have “little, if any basis, in science.” I suppose his new book, published this week in the UK, details not just his awakening but also his argument for the validity of those environmental concerns, and the solutions he believes (and many greens reject) necessary to tackle them.

By now, this all might be too much for committed environmentalists to stomach, so I don’t expect them to have much appetite for Walter Russell Mead’s recent three-part deconstruction of Al Gore, international climate policy, and environmentalism. (Here’s part one, two, and three.) I echo Matt Ridley, who said, “I don’t agree with everything” in these essays, but also like Ridley, I think there’s plenty that is “perceptive” and worth reading. For example, who can disagree with Mead on this:

“Climate of Denial,” Vice President Gore’s “Rolling Stone” essay is not, I am sorry to say, very useful as a guide to resuscitating the environmental movement.  It is largely reduced to the classic loser sandlot complaints: the other side didn’t play fair, they had bigger kids and the refs were biased.  Al Gore seems to want the climate movement to behave like the French Bourbons: to forget nothing in the way of grievances — and to learn nothing about how to do better next time.

All pretty much true, except the facetious part about Mead being “sorry to say” the essay is not a useful primer to resuscitate environmentalism. But if you’re open-minded, don’t let Mead’s criticism of Gore keep you from reading on, or you might miss this:

Whatever one thinks of the scientific evidence for climate change, Gore is on much stronger ground when he argues that the earth is warming than when he argues that a great green global treaty on the lines he proposes can ever be either adopted or enforced.  There are a great many scientists and scientific journals who agree with Mr. Gore about climate change.  Perhaps they are all frauds and mountebanks — but that is a tough case to make in the court of public opinion.  Once the argument moves to science it goes into complex and tricky terrain from which the broad lay public will draw only uncertain conclusions.  Gore does not win the scientific argument as decisively as he would like — but his opponents cannot deliver a political death blow there, either.  The lay public perceives angry experts and dueling theories with a large but not totally convincing preponderance of evidence on Gore’s side.

There is, however, no serious evidence in either history or political studies to suggest that his approach to the problem can ever be adopted or will ever work.  Like war, global warming may well be real — but that doesn’t mean a treaty can help.

The green movement’s core tactic is not to “hide the decline” or otherwise to cook the books of science.  Its core tactic to cloak a comically absurd, impossibly complex and obviously impractical political program in the authority of science.  Let anyone attack the cretinous and rickety construct of policies, trade-offs, offsets and bribes by which the greens plan to govern the world economy in the twenty first century, and they attack you as an anti-science bigot.

To argue with these people about science is to miss the core point.  Even if the science is exactly as Mr. Gore claims, his policies are still useless.  His advocacy is still a distraction.  The movement he heads is still a ship of fools.

Make of that what you will, but I happen to think the green movement is also tottering because it: 1) has gone stale,  2) has narrow demographic appeal, and perhaps most importantly, 3) has no compelling narrative (other than doomsday is always around the corner, and people are bored by that one).

Which is why I think the novelist Ian McEwan, in that Guardian piece, is on to something when he explains why he believes interest in climate change is waning:

I think it’s got a lot to do with human nature. Most issues have a narrative, with the sense of an ending or resolution – the referendum is passed, the government falls – but this really is a lifetime story, and not just our lifetime, but our children’s and their children’s. We are decades away from the point where we say, ‘We’ve finally deflected the rising curve of Co2 emissions, so let’s have one last push to fix it for good.’ We’ve made no impact on this rising curve as yet, and it’s hard to keep interest and optimism alive.

Generally speaking, that’s the big challenge for greens: keeping interest and optimism alive.

Is Mark Lynas, the author of Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, downgrading global warming in his hiearchy of environmental concerns? In a recent post, he writes that

biodiversity may well qualify as a more important planetary boundary even than climate change itself.

By way of reminder, the “planetary boundary” concept was laid out in this 2009 Nature essay, and nicely translated into laymen terms by Carl Zimmer, who wrote in Yale Environment 360:

They [scientists] propose that humans must keep the planet in what they call a “safe operating space,” inside of which we can thrive. If we push past the boundaries of that space — by wiping out biodiversity, for example, or diverting too much of the world’s freshwater — we risk catastrophe.

It’s a controversial concept, but also little discussed, because global warming hogs all the headlines. Jon Foley lamented this one-track mindset here:

In the rush to portray the perils of climate change, many other serious issues have been largely ignored. Climate change has become the poster child of environmental crises, complete with its own celebrities and campaigners. But is it so serious that we can afford to overlook the rise of infectious disease, the collapse of fisheries, the ongoing loss of forests and biodiversity, and the depletion of global water supplies?

I’ve also echoed this complaint:

The biggest problem I have with the debate over climate change science, politics, and policy is that it’s elbowed all other environmental issues off the public stage.

But as I’ve discovered, people get crotchety when you suggest that other environmental concerns be allowed to share center stage with climate change. A reader at Lynas’ blog, evidently annoyed with the post talking up biodiversity, illustrates that attitude:

Please write an entry” My Priorities,’ in which you layout, in order, just what it is you care about most. Maybe then we can start having an intelligent discussion.

Hmm, I get the opposite impression from a comment like that, and it leads me to think that some people really don’t want to have an “intelligent discussion” unless climate change is at the top of the priority list.

So Mitt Romney is the latest high profile Republican to believe that global warming is real.

With apologies to Buffalo Springfield,

There’s something happening here.
What it is ain’t exactly clear.

Indeed. As New York Magazine notes:

Denying that human activity is making the Earth warmer, despite the opinion of people who spend their lives studying these things, was thought to be a precondition of being a serious, viable Republican presidential candidate. But earlier today, Mitt Romney proclaimed at a town hall in New Hampshire that “the world is getting warmer, and I believe that humans have contributed to that.” He added, “It’s important for us to reduce our emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases that may be significant contributors.”

Even though the news broke late on a Friday, it didn’t take long for the climate capo on on the Right to pounce. These days, Marc Morano has turned Climate Depot into a veritable whackfest against his fellow Republicans. It’s been quite a sight.

But with Jon Huntsman, Chris Christie and now Mitt Romney all refusing to drink the GOP Kool-Aid on climate science, Morano is looking less like an enforcer and more like a paper tiger.

UPDATE: Andy Revkin observes:

Marc Morano @climatedepot tries to punish moderate Republicans for daring to mention a human factor in climate change, and reveals his knowing disregard of science in doing so. To attack Romney’s description of the issue below is ridiculous, given that those who would concur include some of Morano’s favorite scientists (Roger Pielke Sr. and Pat MIchaels, for instance).

Michael Levi at his Council on Foreign Relations blog has an interesting take on a recent decision by New Jersey’s Governor:

People who care about climate change are understandably upset with Chris Christie’s announcement that he’s pulling New Jersey out of the Regional Greeenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), the first-of-a-kind cap-and-trade program for carbon dioxide emissions in the northeast. Indeed Governor Christie’s justification for withdrawing is pretty much nonsense: he claims that RGGI was an unacceptable tax on electricity – yet the cost of RGGI permits was far too low to have any meaningful impact on ratepayers.

So why one cheer? Because in the course of rejecting RGGI, Christie embraced the reality of the climate problem. Last fall, he said he was skeptical that human-caused climate change was a real problem. In his withdrawal announcement, though, he made it pretty clear that he thought climate change was a serious matter. This is no small thing for a rising star in a party that has increasingly made climate denial a litmus test for its leadership.

Levi’s point in that last sentence is reinforced by Marc Morano’s reaction, who is now trying to dim that star or force it closer to the Inhofe/Morano orbit.

What’s interesting is Levi’s glass half full perspective on Christie’s announcement (my emphasis):

Indeed I’d argue that given a choice between having Christie participate in RGGI but deny climate change, or reject RGGI but accept climate change, people who care about climate change should prefer the latter. RGGI is a weak cap-and-trade program that currently has minimal direct impact on emissions. Someone who denies climate change is not going to strengthen the program, or support stronger alternatives at the federal level. In contrast, someone who accepts that climate change is real has at least left the door open to supporting serious policies that might combat it down the road.

And that is why Morano will be giving Christie the Gingrich treatment for the foreseeable future. The message should be clear by now: any Republican contenders for President will be forced to run the Morano gauntlet if they don’t march in lockstep with the newly hardened GOP orthodoxy on global warming. Or they could take Morano’s advice, which he delivered in this recent AP article:

Republican presidential hopefuls can believe in man-made global warming as long as they never talk about it, and oppose all the so-called solutions.

Spoken like a true climate capo.

UPDATE: Morano takes offense. Readers coming here from Climate Depot should check out my response.

I’m confused. We have this news:

Worldwide carbon-dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels reached a record 30.6 billion metric tons in 2010, an international energy group reports.

And this admission:

The shock rise means the goal of preventing a temperature rise of more than 2 degrees Celsius – which scientists say is the threshold for potentially “dangerous climate change” – is likely to be just “a nice Utopia”, according to Fatih Birol, chief economist of the IEA. It also shows the most serious global recession for 80 years has had only a minimal effect on emissions, contrary to some predictions.

But utopia must remain our goal, reports the Guardian today:

The world should be aiming to limit global warming to just 1.5C instead of the weaker current target of 2C, the United Nations’ climate chief said on Wednesday.

Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, told an audience of carbon traders: “Two degrees is not enough – we should be thinking of 1.5C. If we are not headed to 1.5 we are in big, big trouble.”

Big trouble. That’s what I tell my two beautiful boys when they won’t listen to me. If you don’t stop fighting, you’re both going to be in big trouble. (I always repeat the phrase for emphasis.) Big Trouble!

Of course, they don’t listen to me. That’s because I’m nothing like my father, who just had to look at me a certain way and I would pee down my leg. But that’s another story.

My point being, the world will not respond to empty threats. And since a dictator does not rule the planet, and the consequences from climate change will not be dire enough to command the world’s cooperation anytime soon, perhaps it’s time for a new approach.

With stories such as this and this becoming more common, I knew it was only a matter of time before someone would show why energy security is no longer a winning issue for climate change advocates. Today, Michael Lind makes the case in Salon:

As everyone who follows news about energy knows by now, in the last decade the technique of hydraulic fracturing or “fracking,” long used in the oil industry, has evolved to permit energy companies to access reserves of previously-unrecoverable “shale gas” or unconventional natural gas. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, these advances mean there is at least six times as much recoverable natural gas today as there was a decade ago.

Natural gas, which emits less carbon dioxide than coal, can be used in both electricity generation and as a fuel for automobiles.

The implications for energy security are startling. Natural gas may be only the beginning. Fracking also permits the extraction of previously-unrecoverable “tight oil,” thereby postponing the day when the world runs out of petroleum. There is enough coal to produce energy for centuries. And governments, universities and corporations in the U.S., Canada, Japan and other countries are studying ways to obtain energy from gas hydrates, which mix methane with ice in high-density formations under the seafloor. The potential energy in gas hydrates may equal that of all other fossils, including other forms of natural gas, combined.

This is all fairly mind-blowing, and is sure to scramble global warming politics and policy. Here’s Lind sketching out the big picture:

If gas hydrates as well as shale gas, tight oil, oil sands and other unconventional sources can be tapped at reasonable cost, then the global energy picture looks radically different than it did only a few years ago. Suddenly it appears that there may be enough accessible hydrocarbons to power industrial civilization for centuries, if not millennia, to come.

So much for the specter of depletion, as a reason to adopt renewable energy technologies like solar power and wind power. Whatever may be the case with Peak Oil in particular, the date of Peak Fossil Fuels has been pushed indefinitely into the future. What about national security as a reason to switch to renewable energy?

The U.S., Canada and Mexico, it turns out, are sitting on oceans of recoverable natural gas. Shale gas is combined with recoverable oil in the Bakken “play” along the U.S.-Canadian border and the Eagle Ford play in Texas. The shale gas reserves of China turn out to be enormous, too. Other countries with now-accessible natural gas reserves, according to the U.S. government, include Australia, South Africa, Argentina, Chile, France, Poland and India.

Because shale gas reserves are so widespread, the potential for blackmail by Middle Eastern producers and Russia will diminish over time. Unless opponents of fracking shut down gas production in Europe, a European Union with its own natural gas reserves will be far less subject to blackmail by Russia (whose state monopoly Gazprom has opportunistically echoed western Greens in warning of the dangers of fracking).

The U.S. may become a major exporter of natural gas to China — at least until China borrows the technology to extract its own vast gas reserves.

The bottom line, according to Lind:

Two arguments for switching to renewable energy — the depletion of fossil fuels and national security — are no longer plausible.

Now that is a game changer.

Below is a guest post from Jonathan Gilligan, an associate professor in the Department of Earth & Environmental Sciences, Vanderbilt University. He is also the associate director of Vanderbilt’s Climate Change Research Network. Gilligan works at “the intersection of science, ethics, and public policy with a focus on the ways in which scientific knowledge and uncertainty affect policy decisions about the environment.”

I have been struck by the similarities between the national impasse on climate policy and the breakdown of policy on nuclear waste disposal. The two cases are by no means identical, but perhaps we can learn useful things from both the similarities and the differences.

As Daniel Sarewitz pointed out years ago, in both climate politics and nuclear waste politics, policymakers have tended to “scientize” the issue by acting as though greater scientific certainty would solve problems that were fundamentally political. No advances in earth science, hydrology, materials science, or engineering will do much to reduce our uncertainties about how spent nuclear fuel will behave underground over the course of tens or hundreds of millennia. Neither do I think it likely that advances in climate science will give us great certainty about exactly how bad global warming will be over the coming centuries.

Fundamentally, the impasse over Yucca Mountain had a lot more to do with politics, values, and trust than with science. Congress had originally called in 1982 for ten prospective sites to be studied, narrowed down to six prospects, from which two permanent waste repositories would be selected, and states would have the opportunity to veto their selection as the home of a repository. But before those studies were complete new legislation amended the Nuclear Waste Policy Act which simply declared Yucca Mountain the only repository for high-level nuclear waste. This “Screw Nevada Bill,” as it came to be known, poisoned the whole endeavor as far as most Nevadans were concerned. Subsequent attempts to justify this political action in terms of science carried little weight in Nevada and the failure to openly acknowledge that the site was selected for political reasons made it impossible for proponents and opponents to have useful discussions.

Another aspect that was unfortunately neglected in most discussions of Yucca Mountain was the fact that people in Southern Nevada may well have been much more concerned about the prospect of frightened tourists choosing other resort destinations than they were about the health impacts to distant future generations.

The Yucca Mountain site was initially defended by ignoring the political and economic implications and instead, focusing purely on scientific health safety issues: It was estimated that water percolated through the volcanic rocks at a very slow rate of less than one millimeter per year, which would mean that it would take hundreds of thousands of years for radioactive material to reach the water table. The decision to store waste at Yucca Mountain was largely presented to the public as “the science is settled: the site is safe, so you don’t have any valid cause to complain.” The political opposition accepted this framing and proceeded to oppose the site by challenging the scientific certainty of the proponents. Evidence quickly emerged that water was actually flowing through the rocks at up to 30 millimeters per year.

As geologists and hydrologists continued to study the site, further controversies and uncertainties emerged. With the revelation that water could get from the repository to the aquifer fast enough to pose a problem, new questions were raised about the resistance of the waste containers to corrosion and there were proposals to modify the design to include an elaborate and expensive set of titanium drip shields to protect the containers.

In 2005, as this was going on, opponents of the repository unearthed emails between hydrologists working on the question of how fast water percolated through the mountain which seemed to indicate (much as the CRU emails would several years later), that the scientists were falsifying their data. Inflammatory exceprts, such as

I’ve made up the dates and names…. This is as good as its going to get. If they need more proof, I will be happy to make up more stuff…

and

I keep track of 2 sets of files, the ones that will keep QA happy and the ones that were actually used.

with instructions to the recipient to “delete this memo after you’ve read it,” led opponents of the project to conclude that they couldn’t trust any of the scientific assurances the site was safe and the governor of Nevada to accuse the Department of Energy of having “intentionally fabricated” the data “in service of shoring up predetermined and politically-driven conclusions.”

Ultimately, much as happened in Climategate, a two-year investigation determined that no data had actually been falsified, that no one had actually committed misconduct, and that informal banter had been mistaken by overheated imaginations to be evidence of a criminal conspiracy.

But by then, it was too late. As the late Edward McGaffigan, a Commissioner at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, told the Las Vegas Sun,

Bad law, bad regulatory policy, bad science policy, bad personnel policy and bad budget policy [meant that] there is no chance Yucca can go forward under current statute. I would go back to the beginning. When you go out of process it’s a problem, it’s a huge political problem. If a process is done fairly, I think you have a shot.

So what are the lessons? I’m not sure, but here are some thoughts: It’s popular to point to well-funded, carefully-organized media campaigns, supported by major industrial interests for the public’s distrust of climate change science and for the political paralysis on climate change policy. But the fact that similar tactics carried out by grassroots environmental activists and local politicians were equally successful at killing Yucca Mountain suggests that the success of inactivist propaganda on climate change may not be due to the power or malevolence of its sponsors.

In both cases, connecting policy action to scientific certainty was likely a bad tactical mistake. In both cases, there is substantial uncertainty about the things we most care about and in fact, in the case of climate change, Martin Weitzman’s Dismal Theorem concludes that calculations of the expected economic cost of climate change are dominated by the mathematical details of the low-probability/catastrophic-consequence tail of the probability distribution. (Weitzman’s theorem is controversial, but the controversy is over the mathematical form he chooses for the tail of the probability distribution.)

Thirty-two years ago, the Charney report on climate change concluded that

If carbon dioxide continues to increase [there is] no reason to doubt that climate changes will result and no reason to believe that these changes will be negligible. … A wait and see policy may mean waiting until it is too late.

Twenty-three years after the Charney report and thirteen years after the birth of the US Global Change Research Program, Daniel Sarewitz and Roger Pielke Jr., argued that we had known for a very long time that political action on climate change was necessary, but it had become politically convenient to spend billions on a futile task of reducing uncertainty as a way to avoid taking prompt action to address the dangers of climate change:

Motivating politicians and policymakers to improve energy policies and reduce vulnerability to climate effects may be challenging, but it does not require a reduction in uncertainty about the future climate.

Finally, there is a very important difference between these two cases. It is not a tragedy that Yucca Mountain was killed. Ultimately, we will need a place to store high-level radioactive waste, but there is no time pressure. Nevada Senator Harry Reid  has argued that it will be fine to keep spent fuel in dry casks at reactor sites for as long as a couple of centuries while we deliberate on how best to dispose of it and while scientists and engineers develop new technologies to make the disposal safer and cheaper.

We do not have a similar luxury of time in the case of climate change. Every decade we fail to take serious action to clean up our energy supply we increase significantly the risk that we will cross some uncertain, perhaps even unsuspected point of no return for truly horrifying consequences. Our ignorance of whether such tipping points exist or at what concentrations of greenhouse gases should not be an excuse for delay, but more reason to act quickly. As climate scientist Wally Broecker has famously described the problem, “It’s like being blindfolded and walking towards the edge of a cliff.”