The world after global warming: Column

Stretch your imagination. Picture a world in which the elusive goal of fully sustainable energy is achieved by the end of this decade. Low-cost, high-capacity batteries make electric cars far less expensive than their gasoline brethren. People buy them in droves. Solar panel prices plummet, so every home and office produces its own power. Wind, hydroelectric and thermal power are sufficient to serve utility-scale energy generation. We cease most oil and gas extraction.

As many know, even this miracle won't avoid global warming's impacts. Greenhouse gases emitted by 2020 will persist in the atmosphere for a century or so. In the best case, they alone will warm Earth — within our children's lifetimes — by perhaps two to four degrees Fahrenheit compared with pre-industrial times.

Yet we are thinking too small if we frame climate change's core lessons around fossil fuel use, or even energy sustainability. The deeper lesson concerns a critical milestone civilization has now passed. For the first time in human history, our actions have substantially changed Earth in its entirety: not just one nation or region, not just for a few decades, but all of Earth, forever. We now wield the physical capacity to irreversibly alter nature, along with our own society, on global scales. What's troubling is that we have acquired this capability — and the motive to apply it — before possessing the experience to do so wisely.

Global-scale reach is beneficial to the extent that it enables humanity's advance, but its side effects portend deep new challenges. It is not hard to envision high-risk global issues that could follow global warming: rapidly proliferating infectious diseases with no antidote, self-replicating intelligent machines gone awry, genetic engineering glitches that ripple through our complex ecosystem, cascading species loss and much more.

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How did we get here? Civilization's unrelenting penchant for progress — whether measured by population growth, technological sophistication, energy use or other means — ensured this eventual arrival. Global warming is merely the first full-blown example of our newfound reach. It will not be the last.

We were warned. At least three times previously, humanity has flirted with global-scale issues. The invention of nuclear weapons in the 1940s, and their subsequent proliferation, provided the first inkling that we could ownv the capacity to erase humanity and nature forever. We have avoided doing this, so far, largely through a fragile reliance on individual and institutional restraint. In the 1960s, concern arose that population growth might outstrip food production and cause widespread starvation. Technology, in the form of increased farm productivity from fertilizers and pesticides, allowed us to avert, or at least delay, this crisis. In the 1980s, industrial gases were found to be depleting the ozone layer that protects all life from severe genetic mutation. A treaty-based solution emerged through recognition that the few companies involved could readily shift to safer chemicals.

These precursors were our training wheels for bigger things to come. Their misleading lesson was that we inevitably innovate straightforward solutions — such as restraint, technology or treaties — once the need arises. It won't happen with climate change. The risk of global warming was first recognized many decades after industrialization committed us to a vast carbon-based energy infrastructure. Our opportunity for simple solutions was then, not now.

Humanity's new global reach will increasingly trigger such deferred issues, which first threaten society long after our limited foresight seeded their emergence. Antibiotic obsolescence may be the next. We will find that traditional tools for overcoming our problems — political, economic, social, engineering and more — seem to fail us. Critical decisions will be profoundly uncomfortable, such as weighing our financial welfare against our children's, or one nation against another. Benefits of action, and costs of inaction, could appear hopelessly ill-defined. Resignation to a known threat might seem a more reliable course than action involving sacrifices. There could be just one opportunity to succeed. We have encountered all this with global warming.

Building a path forward will stretch us. The first step is recognizing that humanity's future is replete with global-scale issues, ever growing in complexity and differing in profound ways from lesser problems faced before. We must find new means to anticipate them, become adept at making wise decisions despite unknowns and ensure rapid action spanning political boundaries. None of this will be easy.

This is a long-term perspective. It won't help resolve global warming today. But our transformation to a global-scale society has more facets, with more hidden implications, than we like to admit. We must begin facing up to poorly recognized aspects of society's global-scale future — or risk being unprepared as each new problem arises.

William Gail's book Climate Conundrums: What the Climate Debate Reveals About Us was recently released. He is the former president of the American Meteorological Society and co-founder of Global Weather Corp. in Boulder, Colo.

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