(Based on Time to Renature the Climate Conversation, published at The Climate According to Life, theclimateaccordingtolife.substack.com)
About a month ago, in a piece called Now for a Little Climate Perspective, I took us up to space to display, in a single glimpse, what I mean by “the climate according to life.” There we could see Earth in its context, a planet amongst planets circling a sun, yet, like a living flower amongst a collection of stone flowers, entirely unique, its own thing because it’s alive. Life makes all the difference to Earth’s climate too, endowing it with systems the climates of the other planets lack, like transpirational cooling, biotic cloud generation and living soils. Yet despite its intimate evolution and coupling with biological processes, Earth’s climate is officially assessed according to a “physical science basis.” Since there are two sides to climate, biological and physical, life and non-life, it’s natural to ask, why pick the physical side? And what is meant by the term “physical science basis?”
In a follow-on piece, The Climate According to Numbers, we went back to the early 1970’s, the initial days of modern climate science, to see how the physical science basis came about, noting how it arose out of early attempts to model and predict weather, and was then expanded to include climate. It’s not so much a theory as a tool, a mathematizing tool, reducing the climate to numbers and physical equations for the sake of computer modelling and quantitative analysis. In theory, it’s meant to include all influences on the climate, biological and physical, or what the late Mediterranean meteorologist Millan Millan called the “two legs” of human-caused climate change—CO2 and the greenhouse effect comprising one leg, land disturbance and water-cycle effects the other. But in practice, especially in the early days, the models could only “see” physical aspects, such as the average warming of the atmosphere caused by the globalized spread of CO2. Biological processes involving things like cloud generation and inland rain recycling were far too complex for modelling at the time.
As we see, the physical science basis has a certain physical bias. Most scientists understand that. They know that models are tools-in-progress, growing by accretion, adding new features of the climate system as they are able, making them more and more “life-like.” But what happens when the physical science basis, or the reduction of climate to numbers, leaps beyond science and enters the broader social domain without an attempt to explain the complexities?
That’s what we’ll explore now. As it turns out, it was recently the twentieth anniversary of a highly influential essay called The Death of Environmentalism: Global Warming Politics in a Post-Environmental World, which provides some insight into what in fact did happen. As the title suggests, it wasn’t good for environmentalism.
But before we get to that, we need to look at how such a leap happened. How did climate science, which at one time saw “the climatic effects of man-made surface change” as fundamental to climate, get construed into a plea for the death of an institution dedicated in part to defending the land from “man-made surface change,” otherwise known as habitat destruction? It’s quite a leap when you think about it. Though it wasn’t a leap. It was more of a bridge-crossing. And the bridge? It assembled itself, as happens whenever scientific information needs to be conveyed to the public. It’s a structure made of government reports, articles, media coverage, activist demands, economic incentives, political calculation. And I would say construction began sometime after the summer of 1979.
That’s shortly after Jules Charney, a leading figure in the Global Atmospheric Research Program (GARP), led a small team to Woods Hole, Massachusetts to answer a simple question: “what would happen if atmospheric CO2 levels doubled?” They gathered the world’s best models and pretty much averaged the results, producing what is known as the Charney Report. The answer? 3 degrees Centigrade. That may not sound like a lot, but it is, and points to a planet much different than what we’re used to.
As I’ve written, the report was a bombshell, putting CO2 and global warming on the political map. Arguments immediately began flying for and against the report. Scientists attempted careful explanations. Media and journalism entered the fray. Global institutions like the IPCC and the UNFCC were created and structured around it. Financial interests perceived gold in the scale of industrial build-out being proposed as a fix. Politicians saw a ballot-box miracle, being able to promote development while also being “green.” The bridge took shape and the climate science travelled across. But as you see, only one aspect of it, CO2, made the passage, or in Millan Millan’s parlance, only the CO2 leg walked across. The more biological land-change leg, poorly represented in the models, and with no attempt made to point that out, got left behind.
This could be called the second reduction. The climate was reduced first to numbers for the sake of computer modelling, then it was reduced to a single causative agent, CO2, a reduction which science may not have even originally called for. I certainly don’t think Charney and his associates intended by their report to say that CO2 is the sole matter of climate. They were just answering a question about CO2 emissions, an important question, for sure. But they could also have been asked, “what would happen if we doubled the rate of land destruction?” That too would profoundly affect the climate. And I suspect they would have answered “great question, yet there’s no way we can answer it now because our models aren’t there yet. But we can model CO2 and have some disturbing news for you.”
The other reason I don’t think they intended to say carbon is the sole matter of climate is because science didn’t think that at the time. Just a few months prior to the Charney Report, the World Meteorological Organization hosted its first World Climate Conference, producing a report it described as “the most profound and comprehensive review of climate in relation to mankind yet published.” In the report, the two legs as described by Millan are clearly seen. For instance, its first paper, under a discussion of “the impacts that are of the most relevance to the subject of climate,” placed “the transformation of the land surface of the planet by forest clearance, the ploughing up of the steppes and great plains, land reclamation, etc.” at the top of the list. The section “Human Activities that Affect Climate” is in fact divided into two parts, the first for land change, the second for CO2—Millan’s two legs of climate. Clearly, science saw what we do to the land as a critical part of the story.
This double reduction went on to profoundly shape the thinking of the emerging climate movement, with some pretty dramatic results. By its title, The Death of Environmentalism gives the impression that the authors, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shallenberger, encountered something dying and wrote about it. But that is not right. Their point was to kill it. “We have become convinced that modern environmentalism, with all of its unexamined assumptions, outdated concepts and exhausted strategies, must die so that something new can live.” They “dropped” their essay at the annual meeting of the Environmental Grantmakers Association just to show they meant it.
That “something new” appears to be more of an industrial project than what we would normally think of as environmental, part of a broad current within the emerging climate movement. The new job of environmentalism was to lead the country toward the carbon-free economy. What environmentalism really needed was an industrial policy.
There’s more that can be said of this essay. It’s ten thousand words long and there are many points raised, a few I agree with. But the question needs to be asked: would this perspective even make sense if the land-change leg had made it across the bridge and we understood that what we do to the land we do to the climate? For once you see the ecological side of climate—the plant transpiration and soil fungi, the cloud creation and water cycles, the cooling and buffering, the moderation of flood/drought cycles—you see that the work of environmentalism, protecting living things and ecosystems, has been climate work all along.
The Death of Environmentalism isn’t the only example of how an incomplete view of climate led in a rather un-environmental direction. In July 2021, the Atlantic Monthly published a piece by Robinson Meyers essentially calling on people to trade in hugging trees for transmission towers. They’re the true green saviors, he argued, up “against the forces of the dark—in this case NIMBYs, old-school environmentalists, and utility lawyers.” In April of 2023, Mother Jones devoted an entire issue to the theme, Electrify Everything, with a piece by Bill McKibbin arguing that progressives must learn to love the “green building boom,” despite what such a boom means for the land, and therefore the climate. Fronting his piece is an image of a woman standing in the iron bucket of a giant trench digger, lovingly hugging it, the new environmentalism.
Such reductionism isn’t new of course. We’ve been reducing life to human purpose for centuries and millennia. We shouldn’t be too surprised that a physical science basis would lead to a technical solutions paradigm, and that the climate crisis would be reduced to an argument for a whole new scale of industrial development. It’s our modus operandi. But as troubling as I find the approach to climate, I don’t wish to vilify its protagonists. McKibben merits praise for his dogged work confronting fossil fuels. I saw Ted Nordhaus interviewed by Andrew Revkin and found two decent people I at times felt in alignment with. For instance, at one point Ted Nordhaus mentioned he felt humans may be able to survive a 3 C rise in global temps, but worried that other species wouldn’t. I appreciated the attention to the more-than-us. It’s increasingly rare these days. One of Andrew Revkin’s pet subjects is local resilience, something I also advocate. The local is not only where politics often works best but where we encounter the land leg of climate, in the landscapes around where we live.
Interestingly enough, Revkin concluded the interview noting, with genuine humility, that things have gotten pretty complicated and we need to “embrace complexity.” That struck me, because it echoes the title of the Embracing Nature’s Complexity conference I wrote about in May, where scientists and science-communicators gathered to explore ways that this other side of climate, the biotic side, can be conveyed to the broader public. The climate story isn’t fully told yet. Though left behind, the land leg of climate never went away, and is being brought into focus by some very intelligent and committed people. Sooner or later, we’ll all have to embrace the living complexity of climate, and though Revkin probably had other things in mind, I find the confluence in language hopeful.
The climate crisis is all too real, and we’ll need both legs beneath us if we’re going to find a way out of the box canyon we’ve marched ourselves into. We think the answers are in our heads, our equations, our models, our technology, but it’s under our feet and around us where we should look, that out of which we emerged. Earth is a life event, with 3 plus billion years of biotic memory around maintaining a habitable climate against physical reality, which would have this place a frozen rock. On this planet, life is central, as breath by breath we are reminded. So it is with Earth’s climate. Our language, our science, our conversations, our media reports, our poems, our songs, our demands should reflect that.
