Climate Change in Ten Words

The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication provides a useful ten-word summary of climate change:

It’s real

It’s bad

It’s us

Experts agree

There’s hope

Yes, that’s a bit over-summarized. But each of these sentences has been studied and confirmed with unprecedented depth and detail. Starting with hope:

There’s hope: The book Electrify by Saul Griffith details the numbers for the US, concluding that in 2022 there was an optimistic but feasible path for the US to lead the world in replacing fossil fuel infrastructure with electrified infrastructure and renewable power generation to achieve the goal of 1.5C of warming. That path requires heightened ambition for more and faster climate mitigations—everything from electrifying your household to cleaning up the electricity that you use to developing and deploying new technologies for aviation, deep-sea shipping, and manufacturing zero-emission fertilizers, cement, and steel, capturing fugitive emissions, and more. The Inflation Reduction Act and other programs of the Biden administration were a shining beacon of the right goals and policies.

Unfortunately, the current US administration is doing everything they can to kill such hope, even adding short-term economic costs that hurt all parties except fossil-fuel companies. Our slow response now necessitates even more urgent actions. (While China currently emits more GHGs than any other country, China now builds and deploys enough renewable generation and infrastructure each year to retrofit all of the US grid.)

The good news is that renewable generation and storage keep getting cheaper--several years ago it became cheaper to build and operate a wind or solar farm than it was to operate a coal or nuclear plant in most places. On a household scale, electrifying transportation and housing for the average US household cuts energy costs more than 50%. But who will pay for all that? All we need to do is to start buying clean options when it comes time to replace a vehicle, furnace, hot-water heater, etc. (It turns out that the average lifetime of a furnace is nearly the same as a light-duty vehicle, about 16 years.) Some EV models are already reaching capital cost parity, and grid-tied EVs will supply far more storage than utilities will install. 

You are part of the solution, and every incremental action you take will be incrementally felt by some creature somewhere. That creature may be your child or grandchild. Yes, stopping climate change is an enormous and difficult project, but we have no other choice for human or ecosystem survival.

We all incrementally contribute to the problem, and a single household’s emissions are indeed negligible on the global scale. But we created this problem incrementally and the solution requires all of us to incrementally ramp down our emissions. We must stop blaming others or waiting for others to fix this. We must plan to reduce our household emissions, in addition to local and regional policy advocacy.

Back to the details:

It’s real: The hottest day on record was July 24, 2024, and the second hottest was the day before. The summer’s peak temperatures in the Arctic were up to 40 degrees F higher than normal. Each of the past twelve months have been the hottest in recorded history. The concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere is now the highest it’s been in 3 million years. Politicians who still assert that climate change is a hoax only continue to damage their credibility.

It’s bad: Even if we stopped all of our excess greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions  tomorrow, the existing GHG pollution in the atmosphere would continue to further heat the earth for centuries. Humanity is facing an unprecedented challenge from the trillion tons of excess GHG pollution we’ve dumped into the atmosphere. Despite decades of warnings from scientists, incumbent energy industries have been able to continue their disastrous business model that destroys ecosystems by changing the climate everywhere. Our current trajectory results in about 4C of warming by 2100, implying desertification of the lower latitudes and massive northward migrations.

It’s us: Oil company climate messaging has shifted from outright denial to simple delay--this isn't so bad, we'll fix it down the road, nothing to worry about. That shift occurred after the first climate damages hearing in federal court in 2018 when five oil majors immediately caved, agreeing that climate change is real and that burning fossil fuels is a major cause. Then the tobacco pivot--they deflected blame onto the silly customers who buy their grossly defective product. And kept spending billions on disinformation campaigns.  

For the sake of our children and grandchildren, each of us must reduce our consumption of their grossly defective products. And we'd better steer this ship very soon because we're on a trajectory for about 4C of warming, which implies massive desertification and northward migrations by 2100. The 2023 IPCC report states, "There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all."

Economically, global investors won't acknowledge the externalized cost deficits we're accumulating—because that would kill the rosy earnings reports. Last year the traditionally libertarian Chicago School of economics calculated that a $190 per MTCO2e social cost of carbon amounted to nearly half of the operating profit of the largest global public companies. In other words, your 401K is probably worth less than half of its reported value if you consider the externalized costs that will be paid by society. Future damages? No, not a big deal, we'll fix it later, nothing to worry about. Meanwhile in 2021 global subsidies of fossil fuels amounted to $11 million per minute.  

Experts agree: In the US, decades of fossil-fuel disinformation has many people still believing that climate scientists don’t agree about climate change. Of course, there many details we’re still learning about climate change. But an overwhelming majority of scientists agree that it’s real, it’s existential, and it’s human-caused. The days of climate denial are over, but the GOP and fossil-fuel companies still try to sow doubt.