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2 2. See www.deepadaptation.info
1 What Climate Science Can and Cannot Tell Us About Our Predicament
Jem Bendell and Rupert Read
Where we are after 125 years of climate science
Climate science was probably born in 1896 with the first, and still valid, calculation of how much the earth would warm if atmospheric CO2 content were to double from pre-industrial values (Arrhenius 2009 [1896]). Given the means of the day, without the use of electronic computers, the Swedish physicist Svante Arrhenius, famous for his contributions to thermodynamics and the understanding of chemical reactions, calculated that the earth would warm by about 4°C. His value still lies within the range of modern estimates, produced by hugely complicated computer models (Slingo 2017). Arrhenius even calculated that regions near the poles would warm much more than those near the equator, something that is still seen as a major finding of climate science.
Awareness of humanity’s vulnerability to changes in climate was high at the close of the nineteenth century. Arrhenius’s native Scandinavia and much of northern Europe had only recently come out of the Little Ice Age, a cold period that had led to frequent crop failure and starvation (Lee 2009). His hope was therefore that increasing amounts of ‘carbonic acid’ in the air – atmospheric carbon dioxide – would bring about better weather and increased crop yields for the colder regions of the earth.
Fast forward one and a quarter centuries, and the predicted climate heating has become obvious to almost everyone (WMO 2019). Even if we did not have the benefits of modern climate science, we would still be able to recognize that we are in a situation never seen by humanity since modern civilization started with the onset of agriculture. Essentially nineteenth-century technologies such as thermometers, the collection of data on emissions of carbon-containing fuels, in combination with Arrhenius’s science, already tell us a complete story: while rates of carbon dioxide emissions from human activities have been rising more or less exponentially (Global Carbon Project 2020), with no signs that this will change any time soon (Betts et al. 2020; Le Quéré et al. 2020), the earth is warming at an accelerating rate (NOAA 2020a). The climate system seems to be out of control, and human activity is the cause.
Human interest in understanding the geological past has created a different branch of climate science a long time ago, now called paleo-climatology. On its own, paleo-climatology can already tell us a compelling story of where we are and further help us understand the scale of our calamity. By drilling deep holes into Antarctic ice and analysing the composition of tiny bubbles found in them, researchers have been able to construct a continuous record of atmospheric carbon dioxide going back