The Year of the Bad Decision, Charles Sobczak (2013)
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. Nay, REQUIRED READING.
The final trigger imagined by Sobczak may not come to pass, but the outcome will be the same.
Some excerpts (with a few comments):
“People no longer talked about the weather—they trembled at it.” 3
“Global warming, or climate change, had lost any pretension of being a liberal hoax or some far-flung meteorological theory decades ago. There were no more debates, anywhere on Earth, about what was happening. There were no more heavily financed fossil fuel lobbying groups trying to muddy the issue with an avalanche of misinformation, spewing out endless press releases about sun spots, solar cycles or natural climactic variations. The argument about whether anthropogenic activities were the leading cause of climate change was over. Death had ended that debate.” 10
“It would take more than a thousand years for that crucial Atlantic conveyor belt to recover.” 41
And yes, now, as we speak, there is clear evidence it is slowing down:https://climatecosmos.com/climate-science/is-the-oceans-conveyor-belt-on-the-brink-of-collapse-2
“China and India were building coal-fired power plants at the rate of one per week and no one bothered to raise an eyebrow. The United States refused to talk about climate change, except when the fossil fuel oligarchs denied it existence. Besides, the policymakers in the U.S. weren’t about to make any energy sacrifices if China and India were free to do what they wanted.” 50
Actually, it looks like China and India are making stunningly large and fast moves away from fossil fuel use:
https://interestingengineering.com/energy/china-opens-worlds-biggest-solar-farm
https://e360.yale.edu/features/india-solar
Neither the U.S. has anything even close to that, and at least in Canada, we have the space!!
“Over time, the 30s became known as the Lost Decade. The weather had turned from dangerous to deadly, and people began to comprehend the real costs of climate change.” 52
“In 2037, when the Greens banned the construction of coal-fired plants in the U.S. … But by then global temperatures had climbed some fie degrees and other, more alarming feedback loops had been triggered. Methane belched out of the Canadian and Siberian tundra and bubbled up from the ocean floor. methane is 20 times worse than CO2 when it comes to warming the Earth.” 69
“Our cows, numbering more than 3 billion in 2030, expelled nearly enough methane to rival the thawing permafrost.” 79
“That year marked the first time the Arctic Ocean was ice-free in 100,000 years. While climate scientists around the world shouted at the top of their lungs that this was an unprecedented and dangerous benchmark, the oil and gas industry executives celebrated. With the ice gone, the vast deposits of natural and gas and oil that lay beneath the Arctic Ocean could now be accessed. …” 107
“That changed when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its eighth assessment report in 2026 [remember, the novel was written in 2013] … It condemned the burning of fossil fuels as being solely responsible for the buildup of CO2 in the atmosphere … There were no qualifiers, no caveats—the science had spoken. Of course, the fossil fuel industry was outraged by the tone as well as the finality of the eighth assessment. They cried foul, just as they had for the past 60 years. They insisted we needed to conduct further research to verify the true impact of greenhouse gas emissions to ensure that they were really a part of the problem. In reality, they only wanted to stall. They wanted more time to mine and burn coal, to pump another few billion barrels of oil, to frack more natural gas and to line their pockets with the profits. But it was over. … People were tired of yearlong tornado seasons, massive Category 5 hurricanes, rising tides, relentless heat waves and flash floods. People were tired of disasters.” 166
“Did they think they were going to take all their profits and relocate to Mars?” 185
They should watch Don’t Look Up.
“Are we worth it? … Civilization is an environmental horror story. Mass extinctions, huge swaths of forests cut to stubble, dredged marshes and drained wetlands, wars, overheated atmospheres followed by snowstorms on the Fourth of July …” 187
“Decades of inaction followed the turn of the 21st century, mostly due to the well-coordinated efforts of Big Coal and Big Oil. They spent billions of dollars in a nonstop campaign to deny and debunk the science of climate change. They funded political candidates who spent their entire careers trying to convince the American people that the was no sound ‘scientific’ basis for global warming …” 247
Sound familiar?
“We had regressed into a world of flawed research, media campaigns, fraudulent wesites and finger-pointing …” 247
“Because of the 100-year time delay built into the effects of CO2 …”
Today, as I write this, we’re at 427ppm. (Compared to 338 just two years ago.)
“We’re in a positive feedback spiral that’s proving impossible to pull out of.” 330-2
Sobczak is referring to CO2 increase, which leads to warmer atmosphere, which leads to more ice melting, which leads to an even warmer atmosphere (because ice, being white, would have radiated some of the heat back up and out), so there are more fires, which means more CO2 (Canada’s 2023 fires created more CO2 than do most large nations in a year, with only India, China, and the US surpassing), which leads to warmer, which leads to less ice, which leads to … you get the picture.
