An Open Letter to the World of 2123: Sorry for the Global Warming

We didn't do enough to curb carbon emissions. You have to suffer the consequences.

On March 20, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued its sixth assessment report. The findings contained in the 8,000-page study are alarming, to say the least. It warns that the world is almost certain to miss its goal of limiting the global temperature increase from human-made carbon emissions to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels within a decade. If the temperature goes higher, the IPPC report said, the consequences for people, animals, Earth's environment and the planet will be catastrophic. It says it is not too late to mitigate the worst effects, but urgent, concerted action is needed -- now. 

"This report is a clarion call to massively fast-track climate efforts by every country and every sector and on every timeframe,"  said U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres. "Our world news climate action on all fronts: everything, everywhere, all at once."

After reading news stories about the report and the report's summary for policymakers, I wrote the letter below. It is addressed to the people living 100 years from now.

Photo credit: by-studio, I-Stock Photos

Greetings from the past to your present. I hope you are doing well. I am guessing you may not be. The future is not easily nor accurately foretold, but I am imagining the world you now inhabit is very likely in the grips of a global environmental disaster as a consequence of the soaring temperatures, the shameless legacy of decades of negligence and denial by successive past generations including mine. We left you one hot mess, but I am guessing that pun isn't very funny to you.

If you're lucky, the worst predictions have been averted by a technological breakthrough that was inconceivable in my lifetime. You never know. Or just maybe, belatedly but not too late, the nations of the world suddenly got serious about reducing carbon emissions and did so rapidly enough to forestall the darkest scenarios. But I am not optimistic.

credit: Romolo Tavani, I-Stock Photos

What I am imagining - or would, if I were still around - is a much hotter planet of failing crops on formerly fertile land, dissolving glaciers and melting permafrost, millions of people, mostly poor people in poor countries, dying of starvation and disease, millions more on the move in a desperate quest for survival or just water, and year-round weather extremes beyond anything we endured. Monsoonal rains, destructive floods, prolonged droughts, and catastrophic hurricanes. Coastal communities, including whole cities, and low elevation islands threatened or already swallowed by rising seas. Raging wildfires sweeping across landscapes, fouling the air for thousands of miles, and the mass extinction of animals, the hapless victims of human folly.

I wonder about things I will never live to know. Is there still snow atop Mt. Kilimanjaro or even the Alps or anywhere? What is left of the Brazilian rainforest? Did the Colorado River dry up? Do polar bears still exist? What about coral reefs? Whatever    happened to Florida or the Maldives? Are they underwater? How hot does it get in summer? Do people still use fossil fuels or are they done, either because they've been depleted or finally, belatedly shunned? 

The funny part — except it’s not funny — is that we were told what would happen if we didn't do something. By the time we began to take action, it was late and what we did was too late.

You may be asking yourselves: what were they thinking? Why didn't they -- we -- stop this? The answer is many of us weren't thinking or chose not to even when scientists warned us. We closed our ears and our minds and went about our lives almost as if we didn’t know that one day the bill would come due. Maybe we just figured that’s not our problem since we won’t be around. Maybe it was just easier to live in denial than change our comfortable lifestyles. 

It's tempting to place the blame on our leaders for not leading. Even as we began to experience crazier weather, broiling summers with temperatures reaching triple digits, strangely shorter, milder winters, many of our putative leaders -- presidents and prime ministers, dictators and autocrats, Congresses and parliaments --  did little or nothing or just not enough, fast enough. Against mounting evidence confirming global warming caused by human actions, some of them even blithely dismissed it. One president of the United States repeatedly denounced climate change as a "hoax."

The fossil fuel industry was an especially egregious bad actor in this. It spent decades challenging the science that supported the connection between human-caused carbon emissions and global warming. We only learned 50 years later that they knew better and hid it, presumably because the truth would have been bad for business. (It makes you wonder: did these captains of industry not care about the fate of future generations of their own families?)

In January 2023, a team of scientists at Harvard University pored over internal documents and academic reports by researchers connected to Exxon Mobil and discovered the oil company's own scientists were well aware as far back as the 1970s that greenhouse gases were causing rising temperatures that, unchecked, would lead to catastrophic consequences. Ironically, their projections about how hot it would get and when proved remarkably accurate. 

The fossil fuel industry then buried these findings and set out to try to obfuscate and discredit the same findings that were being made by independent scientists.

"They knew as much as academic and government scientists knew," the report which was published in Science magazine said. "But whereas those scientists worked to communicate what they knew, Exxon Mobil worked to deny it."

But it's too easy and simplistic to say it's all the fault of our leaders and the fossil fuel and auto industries. Too many of us, regular citizens, just didn't care or didn't care enough to change our own habits of consumption nor made global warming enough of a priority to collectively apply political pressure to demand governmental action.

We fiddled while the world burned. As I write this letter, we are still fiddling.

Photo credit: John O’Connor USFWS

"The party, so long and pleasurable, that gave rise to global warming is indeed still underway," wrote journalist Mark Hertsgaard in 2011 in his book, Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth.  "Despite years of warnings about overheating the atmosphere, we humans are still merrily riding in cars and airplanes, building pipelines and power plants, gobbling meat, clearing forests, expanding our houses and suburbs, and doing a thousand other things that emit greenhouse gases that cause the problem."

photo credit: eric1513, I-Stock Photos

The evidence of the effect of carbon dioxide emissions had been accumulating piece by piece for many years. 

Way back in 1896, a Swedish scientist named Svante Arrhenius published his calculations that demonstrated that adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere could warm the Earth.

"Arrhenius's work was not widely read or accepted at the time, nor was it even intended to serve as a warning to humanity. It can be viewed as such only in hindsight," wrote Patrick Pester in lifescience.com in 2021. "At the time his work simply recognized the possibility of humans influencing the global climate and for a long time."

In 1912, a more widely circulated article ran in Popular Mechanics magazine beneath the headline "Remarkable Weather of 1911: The Effect of the Combustion of Coal on the Climate -- What Scientists Predict for the Future." The author, Francis Molena, wrote: "Since burning coal produces carbon dioxide it may be inquired whether the enormous use of that fuel in modern times may not be an important factor in filling the atmosphere with this substance, and consequently raising the temperature of the earth."

And that was well before 1.5 billion cars and trucks were unleashed on the world spewing millions of tons of carbon emissions into the atmosphere for decades.

Toward the end of the 1950s, scientists began to put the pieces of the puzzle together and realize the situation was not good.

Then on a sweltering summer day in 1988 came a watershed moment. A scientist by the name of James Hansen of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. It was a landmark event for anyone paying attention. 

"In my opinion," Hansen said, "the greenhouse effect has been detected and it is changing our climate now."

But not many people paid attention.

As the years passed, the evidence of climate change grew stronger and ever more alarming. The United Nations' International Panel on Climate Change issued its first report in 1992, linking human activities to "substantially increasing ... the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases."

photo credit: Len Radin

Flooding in Jakarta, Indonesia photo credit: World Bank

In March 2023, the IPCC issued its sixth assessment report on climate change. The Washington Post headline read, World Is On The Brink of Climate Calamity, Definitive U.N. Climate Report Warns.

  

The IPCC warned that if the world warms beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) "climate disasters will become so extreme people cannot adapt," according to the Washington Post story. "Heat waves, famines and infectious disease will claim millions of additional lives. Basic components of the Earth system will be fundamentally, irrevocably altered."

The report said, "There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future."

Media Matters, which monitors media coverage of news, looked at network and cable news coverage of the IPCC report over a 24-hour period.

"Major cable TV networks devoted just 12 minutes to discussing the report. Fox News didn't mention the report at all," it said. "Morning and evening news shows on corporate broadcast TV networks ABC, CBS and NBC devoted just 2-1/2 minutes to discussing the report. CBS didn't mention the report at all."   

 In his book Hot, Hertsgaard wrote sorrowfully about the world his then-young daughter, Chiara, would one day face.

"I still find it hard to reconcile the joy that is Chiara with the climate disasters that loom before her," he wrote. "The older she gets, the closer those disasters come. The relentless momentum of the climate system assures as much, and the glacial pace of the human response only adds to my foreboding."

In 2123, it would be Chiara's grandchildren living in your world. To them and to all of you, I can only say, lamely and inadequately, sorry.

Ron Claiborne

March 2023