Member-only story
Did Setting a Timeline Doom the Fight Against Global Warming?
Advocates and some scientists argue that the world has only years to avert catastrophic climate change — but the public reaction has largely backfired
Every thinking person has had to ignore an apocalyptic warning at some point in their life. Whether it’s a prediction about malfunctioning computers triggering the end of civilization, or a religious-tinted prophecy about the end times, there are plenty of people trying to capture our attention with doomsday scenarios.
What is out of the ordinary is when buttoned-down scientists go on the record predicting a concrete date for catastrophe. After all, science speaks cautiously in correlations and confidence intervals. It doesn’t announce the oncoming end of the world.
But in the last 20 years, a number of scientists have gone on record to set a timeline for catastrophic global warming. In 2006, NASA scientist James Hansen predicted a 10-year window to take action on global warming. In 2007, UN scientists at the IPCC gave the world just eight years to cap emissions and avoid the worst effects of climate change. Also at the UN, Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the UN Environment Program, once declared that there were 10 years before climate effects would slip beyond human control — and that was in 1989.
It now seems that these clear-cut end-of-civilization deadlines caused more harm than good.
All these predictions share something in common. The dates they set are quickly receding into the past as our society storms forward, blowing through every fresh round of emissions targets. So was it all global hype, or have we truly arrived at the end times?
If you want a challenge, predicting the fate of the world’s climate is a good place to start. The science involves massive systems that are well understood on small scales, but much more difficult to predict at global scales.
Take the carbon dioxide (CO2) that rings our planet. We know two things for certain. First, the recent increase in CO2 is from humans burning fossil fuels (we can recognize its isotopic…
