An Existential Threat
Two things happened in the last couple of days that have required me to spend hours in front of my computer. First, Harvard Magazine sent me a digital copy of my monthly subscription. Second, Harvard played Yale in football on Saturday. Decades from now, people will be writing about that game, not for who won or lost, but for what happened at halftime.
In the latest edition of Harvard Magazine, there is an article about a debate going on at Harvard concerning divestment. Lots of faculty and students want the university to sell all the stock in the endowment that has anything to do with fossil fuels. Not only that, they want Harvard to sell any holdings in companies that contribute directly to climate change. The employees, alumni, and students asking for divestment do not feel that Harvard should profit from the destruction of the earth. That last sentence seems commonsensical, doesn’t it? It is also entirely nonsensical that I had to write it.
It is hard to imagine that anyone at a place like Harvard would argue against this position, but of course, the administration is taking a hard line. Money still rules, maybe more so at Harvard than other universities. In the article, professors and students offered up their arguments for and against divestment, I found one to be quite powerful.
Charlie Conroy, a professor of astronomy at Harvard, published the following statement. It is taken in its entirety from Debating Divestment in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, an excellent article written by John S. Rosenberg dated 11/5/19 for Harvard Magazine.
I am an astronomer. I spend most of my time collecting data and running computer models to understand the origin of our Galaxy. But today I speak to you as a deeply concerned member of our community.
I have grown up with the reality of what we once called global warming: rising temperatures, melting glaciers, species extinctions, destabilizing weather patterns. The consequences for humans have also been in plain view: increased occurrence of famine, droughts, and diseases, and, on the horizon, a refugee crisis unparalleled in human history. And yet, like many people I became numb to the increasingly urgent calls for action. I was busy and preoccupied with issues closer to home: raising a family, conducting research, securing tenure. I focused on small acts—recycling, commuting with public transit, eating locally grown food. What more could I do? I am after all only one person.
That thinking was wrong.
As members of the Harvard faculty we have a powerful platform to effect change. This means that we also have a responsibility to use that power in extraordinary times. And these are extraordinary times.
As I speak California is burning. UC Santa Cruz, where I used to teach, has been subjected to forced blackouts resulting in canceled classes. Fire-related evacuations are now a routine part of life for many communities. This is the new normal. In recognition of the climate crisis, the University of California system is divesting its $13-billion endowment and its $70-billion pension fund from fossil fuels.
The ice sheets on West Antarctica and Greenland together hold enough water to raise global sea level by 13 meters. Destabilization of these ice sheets could result in sea level rise of 2 meters by the end of this century and 6 meters by the end of the following century. With 6 meters of sea-level rise significant portions of the Harvard campus will be underwater. As will all of MIT, Fenway, and the South End. Globally the situation will be much worse: 600 million people live at an elevation within 10 meters of sea level.
We in rich countries may be able to mitigate the worst effects of climate change, though the costs may be staggering. Maybe. Maybe not. But island nations, poor countries in South Asia and elsewhere, will not have the option of buying their way out of disaster.
The predicted short-term consequences of climate change from major organizations such as the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] tend to be conservative. We see evidence of this every year as new reports indicate the pace of change is accelerating faster than predicted. The global climate is a complex system with multiple non-linear feedback cycles that are poorly understood. The near future could easily turn out to be much more extreme than current models predict—during the Pliocene Epoch the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere were comparable to today’s levels. During that time the Earth was 3° C warmer and global sea levels were 10-20 meters higher.
There is currently five times more fossil fuel in proven reserves than can be burnt if we are to stay within the 2°C warming scenario advocated by the UN Paris Agreement. Avoiding catastrophic changes to our world will therefore require leaving huge reserves of fossil fuel in the ground. And yet, the fossil-fuel industry continues to devote vast sums of money and resources to identifying new reserves. Despite its profession of support for the Paris Agreement, ExxonMobil has not changed its position since this agreement was signed. In 2015 ExxonMobil projected that by 2040 fossil fuels would supply over 75 percent of the world’s energy needs. In its latest projections from this year, that number has actually risen to 80 percent.
It is simply unrealistic to expect the fossil-fuel industry to willingly walk away from so much money in the ground. As our colleague Naomi Oreskes has demonstrated through extensive scholarship, the fossil-fuel industry has for decades engaged in deliberate doubt-mongering on the topic of climate change. This includes explicit undermining of public policy and indirect undermining of attempts to move to alternative energies. In light of these facts, the idea of working in collaboration with the fossil-fuel industry is dangerously naïve and counterproductive.
These extraordinary times require big ideas and bold leadership.
The scale of the problem is so enormous that many ideas must be pursued simultaneously. We should commit to a carbon-free campus on a rapid timescale. We should incentivize reduced air travel and the use of a robust public transit system. We should encourage significant new academic and research ventures. We should engage with our community beyond Harvard. And we should divest from the fossil-fuel industry.
There are multiple reasons to support divestment. There are arguments from history and from economics that my colleagues will discuss. My perspective is this: the degree of action and change required to avoid the worst-case scenarios is far larger than anything we could hope to accomplish on our own, even as teachers and researchers. Every one of us could commit 100 percent of our time and resources to combating climate change, but that would fall far short of what is needed. This is where divestment comes in. It is an opportunity, perhaps our best opportunity, to catalyze action and change far beyond these walls.
Imagine I came here to announce that a civilization-destroying asteroid is heading toward Earth. Would we wait to act until the probability of disaster is 100 percent? No. Would we wait to act until the impact was days or weeks away? No. Climate change is that asteroid. Its impact will be felt not instantaneously but over years, decades, and centuries. As scientists we have an obligation not only to identify and study the asteroid, but to act upon the clear and present danger it represents, and to join our colleagues in other disciplines in urging responsible action.
Harvard is in a position to lead on this issue. We have a responsibility to do so. Now is the time to act.
Conroy’s points are well taken. I mentioned that he is a young professor, and I think that is important to remember. Older people tend to be more concerned about money than the type of world their grandchildren are going to inherit. That is simply a fact. As I look around, I see little evidence to the contrary. How many people do you know who are cutting back on fuel consumption in an attempt to better the lives of their grandchildren? With that settled, we get to the football game between Harvard and Yale.
Who won the game? Who cares? The only important point is that the second half of the game was delayed by about an hour. Why? Student, faculty, and alumni protestors from both schools took to the field and sat in protest of older generations’ refusal to take climate change seriously. The young people are correct, the old folks running things have given little indication that they care at all about what is happening to earth’s climate. The battle is up to people like 16-year-old Swede Greta Thunburg. She is an activist on an inspired mission to get the people in power to take action on climate change. Ms. Thunberg is the closest thing to a superhero that we have. I will be watching her career through the coming decades with great interest.
How bad is the situation? What are people like Greta Thunberg up against? I often tell people that if New York City is underwater, the people in the Midwest will laugh at them and say: “See…that is what you get. God’s vengeance and so forth and blah, blah, blah…” Even then, the threat won’t be taken seriously. It is quite curious, but I don’t see many older people lamenting the amount of government debt they are leaving their grandchildren. And they certainly don’t care about a figurative asteroid approaching the earth. I guess that asteroid is moving a bit too slowly for them to bother. As for the debt, I think it is a bit too abstract for most people to wrap their heads around. I am not sure what excuse the politicians have, it appears that they simply do not care.
As for the science behind the warming of the globe, I took a course in Climate Change a long time ago. The threat is real, the science is solid, the math is inspired. In recent years it has become clear that the earth is warming at a rate much faster than predicted by the worst-case scenarios. The professor who taught the course was optimistic that the human race would come to its senses and tackle the problem head-on. I chuckled to myself when I heard that. I was not optimistic then, and I feel even more pessimistic about the future now. We may be at the point where we need a Hail Mary type technological solution that will scrub the earth’s atmosphere. I have no idea how that would work, neither does anyone else. I wish us all luck.
One final thought: I read somewhere that there is only one group of people in the world who do not believe in the science of Climate Change. It should not be too hard to guess that there are old, angry, white members of the Republican Party in the United States. Why don’t these people believe in science? It gets a bit complicated, but religion is the main culprit. Have you ever talked to an evangelical about Climate Change? The reaction of most of them to the topic is that it is a liberal conspiracy. There is no such thing as Climate Change because God gave us all that coal, oil, and natural gas. Why would God give it to us if we weren’t supposed to use it? Simple, isn’t it? There is another group of evangelicals, one slightly more sophisticated (I will never type a bigger oxymoron than sophisticated evangelical). They believe that Climate Change is real, but they think that it is part of God’s plan for the earth and its inhabitants. Apparently, God wants the planet to warm for reasons that are far beyond simple human understanding. In any event, neither group has any interest in doing anything about the problem, that would be far too inconvenient.
I will be writing more about this topic in a future post entitled The Science Wars. This regrettable episode in intellectual history was running at full tilt when I was at Harvard during the mid-80s to early 90s. The perpetrators set the scholarly foundation for the rejection of science we are seeing in our society today. Unfortunately, no one knew just how high the stakes were.
