The standard “take” on climate change sounds like this:

Fossil fuel emissions cause the gradual accumulation of heat-trapping gases in the air. This buildup is gradually overheating the planet. That global warming, in turn, is gradually changing other aspects of our climate such as wind and rain. We can expect a nasty 2°C overheating by mid-century. But we can gradually adapt. Reducing emissions will gradually fix the resulting climate problems, someday.

How many fallacies did you spot?

Climate scientists never said that reducing emissions would fix or even reduce the climate impacts. They said that reducing emissions would slow things down—a little. A huge success worldwide, starting tomorrow, would push back the year when the U.S. overheats 2°C from 2028 to 2037. Even if the buildup of heat-trapping gases continues to be gradual, each “gradually” thereafter is just wishful thinking. Gradual loading can provoke sudden shifts, as in that idiom about the straw that broke the camel’s back.

While the climate scientists know that history is full of abrupt “regime shifts,” gradual is the only aspect of the future that they can calculate precisely enough to meet their exacting standards for prognostication. Since that gradual prognosis is pretty bad by itself, they led with this least-uncertain aspect of the climate forecast when warning policymakers.

Alas, gradual-only gives a low-ball estimate of the trouble ahead. It also conveys the impression that climate trouble is predictable, that we will get some warning before we finally have to alter business as usual.

Why have we gotten stuck on the gradual story? Facts that don’t fit a familiar framework tend to get lost in the retelling, especially when you are trying to make them into a good story that will be remembered by those lacking the time to become well informed.

For forty years, the climate problem has been framed for us as a preventable disease, with a prescription that parallels “Limit sugar drinks to avoid tooth rot.” Getting at the root cause is usually a good idea, and emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are the major cause of our climate problems.

Reducing emissions is indeed necessary. It’s just not sufficient.

The Disconnect

Had our leaders taken the climate scientists’ advice forty years ago, the emissions reduction strategy might have headed off much of the last decade’s climate change. But it will no longer do the job. There is now a disconnect between the problem and its recommended treatment.

Even if we were wildly successful in reducing emissions tomorrow, and doing it worldwide, it would make little difference by mid-century in the overheating.

That’s because emissions reduction does not reduce the accumulated excess of carbon dioxide already in the air. Currently, only nature’s removal processes do that, and they are quite slow and fraught with side effects such as ocean acidification. It’s that 43 percent excess of CO2 that counts for the overheating and climate change. That excess continues to grow since reduced annual emissions are not zero emissions.

Thus, another fallacy: emissions reduction doesn't do what most people think it does—reduce the 21st-century climate problem. It does not deserve to be called a “climate solution.”

Emissions reduction has now become what, in medicine, is called an adjuvant, a supplementary treatment that is ineffective by itself but augments a more effective treatment—say, chemotherapy following surgical removal of a tumor that is too big to reduce with chemo.

Prevention versus Repair

In addition to being ineffective by itself, the clean energy notion of a climate fix is wrong-headed in another way, too. Imagine going to a dentist with a toothache— but getting nothing more than a video on flossing and better brushing, then taking your toothache back home with you.

Once you have a problem, the appropriate action is a repair—such as cleaning up the excess CO2, allowing us to back out of the danger zone.

It’s a fallacy to confuse prevention with repairs, or repairs with restoration. Yet nearly every public utterance about climate goes right ahead and promotes the fallacy. It’s a comforting conflation of concepts that unfortunately serves to postpone a serious discussion of more effective climate actions.

Being able to fix a tooth does not, of course, reduce the importance of prevention. The same is true for our climate problem. Clean energy restructuring remains as essential as ever for mid-century. And it would be necessary even if there were not a climate problem.

But to get to mid-century with our civilization intact, we must repair climate in the interim by cleaning up the air’s 43 percent excess of CO2. That is also the only action which will reverse ocean acidification. If there is no cleanup of the CO2 excess, our clean energy improvements may be for naught.

Global Warming is only a rough indicator

There is a second reason for the widespread failure to properly understand our perilous situation. The “global temperature” number that you hear about is merely a rough indicator of the trouble ahead. It is not, as the phrase suggests, the whole earth’s temperature. It is only the near-surface air temperature, averaged over day and night, over both land and ocean, and lumping together all four seasons. And the near-surface air is not the only place where the extra heat can be temporarily stashed.

The global air temperature’s rapid rise started in 1977 but, thanks largely to a more vigorous ocean heat exchanger, it has stalled for the last fifteen years. That’s largely because ocean currents are now stashing more warm surface water in the depths. This secondarily brings cold water up to the surface elsewhere, thus cooling the air there.

So the earth has not stopped overheating after all, only the average near-surface air. The hiatus cannot be expected to endure, given the fickle history of flushing the surface waters into the depths.

“Overheating” is the increase in temperature since the good old days. You are free to pick when that was, unscientific as it initially sounds. That’s because the air’s average overheating is not, as many assume, the driver of climate change.

Beware the reification fallacy: concepts (such as an average) are not actors. The average global warming does not push air around. However, uneven overheating does push air around.

Uneven Overheating and Climate Instability

Since 1978, land overheating (0.8°C) has outstripped ocean surface overheating (0.3° C). Anomaly means the temperature relative to 1978.

In recent decades, the land has been warming almost three times as fast as the ocean surface. Whole continents have become hot spots, not merely their urban heat islands.

This temperature contrast across coastlines changes where the winds blow. As the increasingly warmer continental air rises, it sucks in more wind from off the ocean in a pattern familiar from monsoons. But as those winds strengthen, they need not follow the customary path and may well deliver their moisture somewhere else. Drought here, deluge there.

So we have to expect a rearrangement of our usual wind and rain, even if we cannot yet predict where or when. It is a fallacy to expect a slow drift away from the climate of the good old days.

Furthermore, as long as further overheating keeps enhancing the temperature contrast across coastlines, there will never be a settled new arrangement of wind and rain to which food production might adapt. Unless the temperature contrast across coastlines stops rising, there can be no such thing as “climate stabilization.”

If the suitable habitat for a crop was creeping northward with the years, you can imagine tracking it (“adaptation”). But if wind shifts are randomly bouncing the suitable habitat all around the continent every few years, tracking is unlikely to work well.

Remaining unsettled is called climate instability, and it will relentlessly undermine both agriculture and infrastructure. In this new era of climate instability, don’t make the mistake of thinking things will change gradually. Or that we will be able to predict where and when.

Suppose it’s time to dust off the pharaoh’s seven-year plan for stockpiling grain? The world’s current “reserve” will only last eighty days and only some is held in the public interest by governments.

The Danger Zone from Extreme Weather

Deluge and drought may come from the same shift in the winds. More heat waves and more “Arctic outbreaks” are both encouraged by the longer meanders of the weakening jet stream, as are longer rainstorms and droughts.

Extreme weather also includes windstorms, where the costs are easier to predict. Insurance companies know from experience that a 20 percent increase in wind speed from 50 to 60 mph causes a 500 percent increase in damage, not the 20 percent you might guess. (Welcome to nonlinearity.) With the new normal, insurance premiums will soar. No insurance, no mortgage. No mortgage, no sale. Prices collapse, and perhaps the economy more generally.

More frequent episodes of extreme weather can also strike serious blows to our civilization via our food supply, and do so much sooner than the effects of any slow rise in your local average temperature.

The longer we take in backing out of this danger zone for unexpected lurches, the more risk that a major downwards spiral could start—one that could so disorganize our society that we could no longer act effectively to escape a more devastating collapse. An economic collapse will only be the first phase.

The Second Manhattan Project

Thanks to forty years of postponed action, time is now of the essence. Effective action must start while we are still strong. That’s because even the fastest cleanup project will take decades before it starts to reverse the climate trend.

First, there is the lead time for a Second Manhattan Project to design a big, fast, and sure-fire cleanup—and then to build it (say, four years total with wartime priorities).

Then it takes another twenty years for it to remove enough CO2 to lessen the danger of sudden blows from instability. (That’s my estimate, but I am probably the only scientist who thinks it can be done that quickly.)

The Case for Urgency

A jet stream meander reaching from the Arctic into the tropics.

And if that timeline does not make a sufficient case for urgency, just look at the trends from the last fifteen years where it is claimed that “global warming has stopped.”

Yet climate change did not even pause during that fifteen year period, showing the fallacy of assuming that overheating and climate change march together in lockstep.

The jet stream detours around a blocking high off the California coast. The green circle is San Francisco.

Climate change surged ahead as, among other things, the Arctic warming weakened the polar jet stream. The slowing allows it to meander like a river entering a low gradient flood plain, forming long loops. Some reach down from the Arctic into the tropics. This can allow Arctic outbreaks, frigid air that can spread much farther south and coat palm trees with a thick crust of ice.

Long jet stream loops can also block the usual eastward storm tracks via long ridges of high pressure. Storms, when stalled, can cause week-long downpours and, farther east, a lack of rain. Three years, on and off, of blocking highs offshore set up the current California drought.

Blocking highs in both 2003 and 2010 promoted European and Russian heat waves that just would not quit.

That 2011 Preview of the Road Ahead

Among the consequences of the summer 2010 heat waves were widespread crop failures—and the world proved surprisingly vulnerable.

In more than a dozen countries, food riots with fatalities occurred the following winter when world grain supplies ran low and prices soared. A number of improvident governments lost power in the spring of 2011, not having implemented the pharaoh’s seven-year plan.

Yet this is small-scale stuff compared to what could happen if such episodes become more persistent or widespread. Then you can get trapped, neither able to import food from neighboring countries nor able to successfully cross the closed borders. Enter the four horsemen.

When a country invades a neighbor in an attempt to steal food, all cooperation is lost. Similar events within a country get called civil wars, if not genocides. This tailspin can cause a human population crash. It has happened before, on smaller scales.

A Collapse of Civilization?

You might consider trying to head off such an impoverished future.

It can likely be avoided. Just as a carbon dioxide cleanup means there is nothing inevitable about worsening climate, there is also nothing inevitable about collapse; we are not without resources and ideas. I am quite comfortable about the ability of climate science to understand what’s going on, and am fairly optimistic about our technical ability to clean up the excess atmospheric CO2 within decades.

But the only loud voices regarding climate action seem to be those of the Deniers and the Do-Nothings. Many are sincerely confused or just natural contrarians. But some expensively-amplified voices are on behalf of special-interest sponsors, striving to delay decisions by promoting confusion. Some of those with threatened property values use whitewash jobs to help maintain valuations until they can sell out and leave. To mislead others for substantial material gain is usually considered fraudulent.

Their actions threaten the rest of us, and not just in the pocketbook. Climate scientists do not have the billion-dollar advertising budgets with which to respond to blatant misrepresentations, nor the armies of lobbyists.

Had enough?

This is truly an existential moment, with enormous consequences that few are talking about.