Sad but true, there is no way to reverse climate change

It wasn’t until halfway over the main bridge into Vancouver’s downtown that I recognized that queasy feeling when something is off. Buoyed by a crowd several thousand strong, it was one of those rare, almost euphoric, world-at-your feet moments when the cars are shunted aside and climate marchers command the streets. But something about the chants was bugging me.

“Hey, hey, ho, ho. Climate change has got to go!”

“Ho, ho. Hey, hey. Make climate change go away!”

Set aside, for a moment, the lame-ass arrangement and melody, so pitiable in global contrast. Not for us the joyous choruses of African climate strikes, the thunderous chants in Latin America, the fearsome tirades from the streets of Asia. Even the Americans embarrass us, drawing, as they do, on the dignity and gospel heritage of African American climate marchers who would never countenance another stale “hey, hey, ho, ho.” To be fair, I’ve never experienced the francophone version, but the average Canadian march is rescued only when Indigenous Climate Action liberates the bullhorns.

The real problem on the bridge wasn’t the tin ears, more the clarity of concept. And the nagging problem only fully crystallized when I ran into Kirsten Zickfeld at the rally point downtown. “Do you think they mean it?” she asked, frustration accentuating her German accent. “‘Make climate change go away!?’ People just don’t understand carbon!”

Zickfeld is someone who does. A distinguished professor of climate science at Simon Fraser University, she was one of the authors that produced the IPCC’s seminal Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 °C. Her research focuses on carbon cycles and climate impacts over “multi-centennial” timescales.

A lot of the carbon dioxide spewed from tailpipes and smokestacks today will still be blanketing the Earth in a thousand years. Some, for tens of thousands of years. “The warming from carbon dioxide will also last for at least a thousand years,” Zickfeld told me this week. And that’s why she describes human-induced climate change as “largely irreversible.”

There is no way to make climate change “go away.” (Short of sucking carbon out of the atmosphere on a scale bigger than the global fossil fuel industry or perhaps shielding the Earth from the sun). And so, you’ve got to wonder about all the ballyhoo over “climate solutions.” What does it mean to speak of cures for an irreversible condition?

We can certainly reduce emissions. You hear about it all the time (even if there’s more hearing than happening). But, another unforgiving fact about climate change is that it doesn’t get better if we reduce emissions — it will just keep getting worse until we eliminate them. Until we get to zero emissions from burning fossil fuels, from cattle, steel, cement and all the rest.

The eggheads among you will recognize this as a cumulative problem. In technical jargon, a problem of stocks, not flows. It’s about the tub, not just the tap. But I’m not convinced it’s worth a public education campaign on this point. (Hey, hey, ho, ho. Bathtub analogies have got to go.) What the public and political leaders need to understand is that we need to get to zero for carbon and drastically cut other greenhouse gas emissions.

Then, and only then, can we hope global heating will stabilize — at whatever level of climate breakdown we’ve reached. Like a ratchet, the temperature will stay wherever we’ve notched it, along with the level of climate consequences. Although even here Zickfeld sounds a note of caution: “some impacts — ones with inertia, like sea level rise — would keep getting worse, over centuries.”

Someday we may stop temperature rise from getting worse, but is that “solving” climate change? It won’t have “gone away.” What does it mean to speak of solving a problem that doesn’t have a solution?

One way to think about the Paris Agreement and solemn pledges of “climate leadership” is to flip them on their head and understand the official plan for the planet is to keep making climate change worse well into the second half of this century (net-zero by 2050!).

Even that’s probably disingenuous. The path to zero is fantastically challenging. We’ll look at this a bit more in The Roundup, below. Effectively, a wartime mobilization sustained for decades to track the smooth trajectories of policy wonks whose models exclude the obstacles along the way (you’ll notice, even the luckiest population in the world is all cheering for the Oilers, at the moment — not to mention the billions still striving for flat screen TVs).

And, while I feebly tried to persuade Zickfeld the chants on the bridge could be chalked up to a moment of exuberance, you’ve probably also realized almost no one in the general public understands these inconvenient, merciless truths.

I get the chance sometimes to watch focus groups about climate change. They’re sobering. Let’s be polite and describe the prevailing understanding as unformed, or perhaps “unstable.” Most people don’t really understand what causes climate change or how it works — which is why talk about “solutions” mostly centers on recycling.

And there is an underlying assumption that we could make climate change “go away.” Like we make smog go away. When air pollution finally gets unbearable, we put catalytic converters on cars, scrubbers on smokestacks, close the coal plants — and it dissipates. See Toronto or Los Angeles from 1970 to 2024. But carbon just isn’t like smog. Carbon is forever (on human timescales, anyway).

It’s perfectly understandable to want “solutions,” but I worry we’re reinforcing these misperceptions. Governments tout and companies advertise their “climate solutions.” Media outlets air “climate solutions” programs (guilty as charged — though, in our defense, when Canada’s National Observer kicked off, it was a lonely, largely unfundable beat). Just try, I dare you, to get any funding these days, without pretzeling your proposal into the philanthropic “climate solutions” docket.

And perhaps “climate solutions” is just one of those notions we can’t do without. Like spirituality or cleaning your room. You’re never quite sure what objective the other person has in mind. Indefinable yet indispensable. We can’t just allow climate change to spiral completely out of control and we need some shorthand way of talking about tackling the polluters.

And we don’t want to kneecap hope. People less dysphoric than me make a convincing case that hope is a useful ingredient for progress. In specific contexts, “solutions” can even make sense. There are, unquestionably, solutions to fossil-fuelled transport, heating and electricity.

But the ubiquity of “climate solutions” has me thinking about an old friend. For over 30 years, I’ve returned again and again to the advice Valerie Langer once offered, half joking, back in the War in the Woods defending the old growth forests of Clayoquot Sound. She’s still protecting forests, now with the organization Canopy, and her advice holds up: When the destination is out of sight, set a plausible objective and when the public and governments catch up, it’s “time to move the goalposts.”

We have, fingers crossed, won the battle about whether climate change is happening. But the media seems to have leapt from both-sidesing climate denial, vaulted right over the basic causes and conditions and is now assigning cloying, decontextualized “solutions journalism.” Even the Financial Post and Wall Street Journal pepper their pages with the stuff. Maybe it’s time to move the goalposts.

I don’t pretend to know the next phase. But I wonder if it’s not along the lines of harm reduction. We could, a few decades ago, have spoken credibly about “solving” climate change. Now, we’re in it, it’s going to get worse for decades to come, and we’re going to have to muddle through.

Every tenth of a degree we can prevent matters enormously. Every heat shelter can save lives. Shielding the Earth may become the ethical decision.

Harm reduction won’t arouse the same euphoria at climate marches. Hey, hey. Ho, ho. Minimizing harm is the way to go. Not so catchy. But it might be a more honest posture for squarely facing up to our climate predicament.