Why we should not be "climate neutral"

A comment by Michael Schmidt-Salomon.

https://www.giordano-bruno-stiftung.de/meldung/klimawandel-evolutionaerer-humanismus

Humanity must change its way of doing business to limit global warming. But it is also true that human influence on the climate prevents a no less dangerous ecological catastrophe. If the "Fridays for Future" movement took this into account, it could gain credibility.
 
The universe that we can observe has exactly those qualities that it would have to have, if there is no "divine plan of salvation" behind it, but merely the blind management of coincidence and necessity. For this reason, the earth is not a "paradise" in which we could continue to live in eternal bliss, it merely offers us - and only within a limited time window - a semi-stable ecological niche in which upright primates live reasonably comfortably and multiply can.

How fragile the ecological system in which we live has become aware of many people today through the debates on climate change. It has meanwhile been proven that our production and consumption methods contribute to an increased greenhouse effect and - associated with that - to a rapid rise in global temperatures in the history of the earth. And it should be clear that we need to take effective countermeasures, as unchecked climate change would have serious consequences for human civilization as well as for much of the nonhuman wildlife.

However - and this, too, is imperative for an evidence-based approach to the world: the high proportion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that worries us so much has prevented even more devastating climate change, namely the beginning of a new cold period within the current ice age.

To explain this, one has to go further: in the longest phases of the earth's history there was no ice at the poles. Thus, the rise of dinosaurs and later mammals took place in a warm age, when the global temperature was much higher than today. The present ice age began 2.6 million years ago, which is why we can call ourselves "Ice Age People". Fortunately, however, we live in an interglacial, that is: in a temperate warm period within an ice age. The present Interglacial, the so-called Holocene, to which human civilization, as we know it, is adapted, began about 12,000 years ago. In this respect, we should actually expect that it could be over with the pleasant, mild temperatures very soon, because such warm periods within an ice age have on average only a duration of about 10,000 to 15,000 years.

It has long been known that the transition from an interglacial warm period to a glacial cold period is determined by the degree of solar radiation and the magnitude of the greenhouse gases contained in the atmosphere. More precise insights have only been available since 2016, thanks to a - as I think - spectacular article published by Andrey Ganopolski in cooperation with two other colleagues from the "Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research" (PIK) in the journal "Nature".

Not only did the researchers determine the conditions responsible for transitioning from an interglacial warm period to the glacial cold period, they also found that humanity barely escaped the fate of a cold. If the carbon dioxide content in the preindustrial time (say in the 18th century) were only 240 ppm (parts per million) instead of the actual 280 ppm, those fatal, self-reinforcing processes that took us out of the pleasant Holocene would have been initiated into an uncomfortable new cold season. When asked why carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere were at that time marginal, but highly significant, 0.004 percentage points (40 ppm), the researchers also pointed to a possible influence of humans in the pre-industrial era, such as the widespread deforestation of Forests that have prevented the reduction of excess carbon dioxide during photosynthesis.

And this is indeed an interesting finding: the fact that cutting down forests under certain environmental conditions could prevent a devastating ecological catastrophe completely contradicts our moral intuitions, which are ultimately based on a romantic image of nature. But this only shows that the romantic understanding of nature fed by religious ideas ("holiness of creation") obscures the view of reality. Nature is not "good" and man is not "evil". With moralism or an unreflective "alternative radicalism" (Hans Albert) we can not get on with it: we have to take a closer look to understand the ecological interactions that guarantee our survival. Although the "For Future" movement would have to be morally disarmed if it no longer perpetrated the human contribution to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as "harmful to the climate", that would make it more credible and make the so-called "climate skeptics" more effective rebut.

The influence of man on the world climate in the pre-industrial period was still weak (which is why he is rated differently in research), it is now obvious: In the course of the industrial revolution, the carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere of the 280 ppm in the 18th It has risen to more than 400 ppm in the 19th century and will continue to increase in the near future. Ganopolski and his colleagues came to the remarkable conclusion that, given the length of time carbon dioxide has been left in the atmosphere, we probably do not expect the onset of a new cold season in the next 50,000 to 100,000 years.

It is thanks to human influence that the Holocene could become an exceptionally long-lasting interglacial - unless we can not get our greenhouse gas emissions under control. Because then could be from the interglacial warm period, a real hot age, so a new geographic age without ice at the poles. While human civilization would probably survive in such a warm season much more than in a glacial cold period, the ecological, social and cultural disruptions that would take place in the transition from the Ice Age to the Warm Age would be enormous.

We learn from this that Darwin's famous phrase, "Nothing is more constant than change," is of course also valid for the world climate system. We humans need to adapt to the processes of change on earth or, if possible, do everything we can to prevent these processes from destroying our ancestral ecological niche. Therefore, on closer inspection "climate neutrality" is not a particularly smart concept, because if we were really "climate-neutral", we would inevitably be heading for a new cold season. So instead of being "carbon neutral", it is important to be "climate effective" in an intelligent way so as to preserve the ecological niche of the interglacial, which is pleasing to us (and other sentient animals), which is in the "natural blueprint" of the earth unfortunately not provided at all.

For this reason, we can not focus solely on reducing the "negative footprint of humanity" (though this attitude may be in line with a widespread puritanical-moral "repentance reflex"). Our goal must instead be to increase the "positive footprint of humanity," as the Cradle to Cradle School of thought has been calling for years in line with humanistic values.

In essence, it is about establishing a "smarter metabolism with nature" - not only, but also with regard to the world climate system. Although much more needs to be done in the area of climate sensitivity or geoengineering, we already know what needs to be done today: For example, unlike the previous generations, we have to reforest the forests instead of cutting them down, to counteract a fatal climate change. Or that, especially in the poorer regions of the world, we need to increase prosperity and improve education systems in order to limit the increase in world population - which shows that we must tackle the UN's 17 "global goals" together, systematically. Isolated climate protection, which suppresses economic, social or cultural factors, will not work.