Down to the wire : confronting climate collapse / David - Index of

204 S farther horizons
and account for wealth, which is to say a matter of economics.
However diffi cult, it is probably repairable in a matter of a few
years. The second is ecological. It is permanent, in signifi cant ways
irreparable, and potentially fatal to civilization. The economy, as
Herman Daly has pointed out for decades, is a subsystem of the
biosphere, not the other way around. Accordingly, there are shortterm
solutions to the fi rst defi cit that might work for a while,
but they will not restore longer-term ecological solvency and
will likely make it worse. The fact is that climate destabilization
is a steadily—perhaps rapidly—worsening condition with which
we will have to contend for a long time to come. University of
Chicago geophysicist David Archer puts it this way:
a 2°C warming of the global average is often considered to be
a sort of danger limit benchmark. Two degrees C was chosen as a
value to at least talk about, because it would be warmer than the
Earth has been in millions of years. Because of the long lifetime
of CO 2 in the atmosphere, 2°C of warming at the atmospheric
CO 2 peak would settle down to a bit less than 1°C, and remain
so for thousands of years (Archer, 2009, pp. 146–147).
But if the record of earlier climate conditions holds true in the
future, it also means, among other things, a 10-meter sea level rise
as well as warmer temperatures for thousands of years. Climate
destabilization, in short, is not a solvable problem in a time span
meaningful for us. But we do have some control over the eventual
size of climatic impacts we’ve initiated if we reduce emissions
of CO 2 and other anthropogenic heat-trapping gases to virtually
zero within a matter of decades. Assuming that we are successful,
by the year 2050, say, we will not have forestalled most of
the changes now just beginning, but we will have contained the
scope, scale, and duration of the destabilization and created the
foundation for a future better than that in prospect.
There is no historical precedent, however, for what we must
do if we are to endure. Our biology, and specifi cally the way we