Photo

After finishing my post on the inevitability of substantial long-term sea-level rise from Antarctic ice loss, I sent this question to Curt Stager, a paleoclimatologist and author of “Deep Future,” Kim Stanley Robinson, the novelist focused on “cli fi” before that term was conceived, and the astrobiologist David Grinspoon:

Given your focus on long timescales, environmental change and the human journey, I’m wondering if you might do quick riffs on how humans — in your view — will most likely deal with this?

Here are their responses:

Photo

Curt Stager, Paul Smith’s College:

The extra sea level rise due to the collapse of West Antarctic ice masses will play out over several centuries. It’s not like you’ll take your kids to the beach, leave them on a towel while you go to the snack bar for some ice cream, and then come back to find them washed out to sea. When such changes are so slow, it’s hard for people to notice or even believe in them. Major coastal cities from Tokyo to Venice to New Orleans have already been dealing with the equivalent of catastrophic sea level rise for decades, thanks to land subsidence from the extraction of groundwater or hydrocarbons, but you rarely hear about that. It’s the sudden, extreme changes that we notice, and most of us will mainly experience chronic sea level rise in the form of sporadic storm surges that drive higher and farther inland than expected – as happened with Hurricane Sandy. It will be our challenge to connect those dots to expose the underlying trend, and to recognize our role in causing it. For me, though, the apparent inevitability of such a large melt-off alone is shocking. It means that coastal cities I know and wild places like the Everglades that I love are now living on borrowed time, even if we could switch to non-fossil fuels fairly soon. The inundation may take centuries, but hearing that it may be un-stoppable makes it harder to ignore. These are huge changes we’re setting in motion – slow, yes – but huge nonetheless. Judging from our responses to the sea level rise of the past century, our responses to the ongoing rise will probably vary wildly. New Jersey is seemingly trying to rebuild its shoreline communities as fast as possible with little thought for the future, politicians in North Carolina have essentially told coastal planners not to take future sea level rise into account, and some places would like to resist or adapt but lack the resources to do so. On the other hand, the Netherlands and New York are actively preparing for higher sea levels. It’s not so much a question of science as of human nature. Imagine the stink we would all raise if another nation tried to take even one inch of our coastline away from us – and yet here is a slow taking of countless square miles from our shores by a carbon-driven ocean-turned-invader. We’ve become a major force of nature in this new Anthropocene epoch; politics and psychology have now become branches of ecology, and how we think, feel, and act has consequences of geological scope that will echo deep into the future. We’re going to lose a lot of ice and a lot of coast with it, but there’s still time to avoid de-icing the planet entirely. As Washington governor Jay Inslee recently said, we’re the first generation to feel the sting of climate change, and the last generation who can do something about it.

Photo

David Grinspoon, Library of Congress:

How will we deal with this? Well, as you point out, sea level in itself will not have much of a drastic effect for a long time. Yet it is rightfully something people should be concerned about – because people need to become aware of longer timescales, and of problems that will increasingly affect our descendants. But its also fascinating and somewhat terrifying to realize that if this study is right then within centuries we may have to abandon or radically change so many low lying centers of human habitation and activity. A friend of mine joked on Facebook today about becoming a gondolier in New York City. I bet even if it comes to that we won’t abandon places like New York, but they may become unrecognizable. The flooding of low-lying densely populated areas and potential changes to the global circulation system upon which agriculture depends – these are even harder problems than fixing cities. But I think if our society is around for several more centuries we will have to have found different ways to deal collectively with our world-changing technologies. If we’ve made it that far, we’ll find ways to adapt. On the shorter run it adsd to my concern that we are unleashing changes to the Earth system that we don’t actually know how to predict very well. I don’t have confidence in our ability to very precisely predict the responses of the Earth system, and that makes me more concerned about results like this, not less.

Photo

Kim Stanley Robinson:

I think maybe you could connect up this growing awareness of long time or deep time, in human civilization, with the previously noted increase in our sense of spatial reach, that sense that we are now all part of a single global civilization, the “global village” notion. Our sense of space and time has extended to the global, so we think in planetary terms in both now. Thus although I believe strongly in thinking hard about our paleolithic roots as indicators of our mental and civilizational capabilities (see my most recent novel “Shaman”) I also think we are changing culturally, and can now think on the scale of centuries, and plan and act accordingly as a civilization. So this news is germane even though it is very long-range in its implications. We can think that long now. When I was in Antarctica in 1995, what the glaciologists were saying about the WAIS [West Antarctic Ice Sheet], is that its changes will mostly likely take a long time, but there was a wild card, in that there are volcanoes under that ice, and if one were to erupt, things could change very quickly. Now they have found signs that those volcanoes are at least active, if not fully erupting. This was the scenario I pursued at the end of my “Green Mars,’ and in “Blue Mars” all the coastal cities are flooded. In my recent novel “2312” I describe an 11-meter sea level rise that is the result of a similar abrupt change. Manhattan is like Venice, fully functioning, indeed “better than ever” as they say in that time; a setting I plan to return to next year. It was when the ice core data in Greenland established the three-year onset of the Younger Dryas that the geologists had to invent the term “abrupt climate change” because they had so frequently abused the word “quick” sometimes meaning several thousand years when they said that. Thus the appearance of “Abrupt Climate Change” as a term (and a National Research Council book in 2002). Sea level rise is not likely to be abrupt, but merely “quick,” unless one of those volcanoes erupts, in which case all bets are off. I think global civilization will take this new data in, and it will increase the urgency of the decarbonization efforts. Then there will be a long period of adaptation to the climate change and sea level rise already caused and almost inevitable. Maybe geo-engineering will get more discussion and maybe someday some geo-engineering will even be attempted, if conditions get desperate enough. The infrastructure efforts in all the coastal areas of the world could be thought of as simply the necessary human work, maybe even a full employment program of sorts. Intertidal real estate might be a thing: see the Manhattan in my “2312,” or the London in my “Blue Mars.” Strange to think, I’ve been imagining these scenarios for 25 years now. Talk about long time scales! It means I am old. But even as short as our times are, we can still imagine centuries and plan for them, too.

Postscript | There are others I’d like to hear from, including Annalee Newitz, the io9 editor and author of “Scatter, Adapt and Remember,” the novelist Barbara Kingsolver and perhaps Wolfgang Lutz, a population analyst at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria.

Why Lutz?

While glaciologists are modeling the long-term fate of ice sheets (and sea levels), he’s modeling the fate of human populations through 2300. In an important 2008 paper, he and his co-author, Sergei Scherbov, charted a substantial prospect of a non-calamitous path toward 2 to 4 billion of us living prosperously on a thriving planet. Other paths head to 30 billion or more. (A 2013 paper builds on this work.) One of those outcomes is probably a more sustainable fit with retreating shores.

Why does this matter?

It’s important to keep track of the human factor in charting environmental risks, whether of our making or “natural,” given that vulnerability to a hazard — coastal or otherwise — is a function of both the scope of the threat and the amount of exposure (and the resilience of those exposed).

How will humans respond?

The glacier analysis in Antarctica provides a good view both of the scope of changes humans are setting in motion in the “age of us,” the Anthropocene, and the (still poorly understood) complexity of the systems we’re nudging.

In an e-mail exchange with my friend Tom Yulsman, who also wrote about the Antarctic news, I said this in reflecting on broader implications of these findings:

The realities of sea-level rise and Antarctic trends and China’s emissions, etc., make me feel ever more confident that the [bend, stretch, reach, teach] shift I charted for my goals in my TEDx talk (away from numbers and toward qualities) is the right path.

What’s your path?