Naming the Scourge We Made

Our planet's climate system could wind up posing over coming decades or centuries far more disruption and dislocation than anyone can now calculate or guess. Generations being born and those born over the next few decades likely are among the first witnesses to the widespread disruptions and dislocations, no matter what interventions are promised or threatened by our national classes of applied scientists and applied technologists to help us “cope”.

The scourge that is out to tan our hides is a culprit who has been offered many names. “Climate change” and “global warming” remain preferred in media accounts, as deceptive and inexact as each term is. With due thanks to Wallace Broecker for introducing the term in 1975, “global warming” fifty years on does not precisely name a climate phenomenon or a range of global phenomena yielding local meteorological systems equally capable of raising and lowering local temperatures: the term “global warming” may well name the overarching climatological mechanism, but pedestrian humanity is confused when one legitimate consequence of the warming's advent is any seasonal lowering of temperatures or opportunistic invitation for inclement snowfalls and ice storms. Likewise, “climate change” fails to specify and distinguish a climatic and meteorological system already prone to “perfectly natural” contributions with or without direct human participation (however natural humans may have remained).

             No matter what injuries we humans sustain individually and collectively from what looks to be on our immediate horizons, we will not be injured by indulging in a fit of requisite specificity from the relative outset. What reasonably precise locution begins to name this global climatic phenomenon with its aggravated contributing meteorological phenomena, with the full contents of this global climate surging around us?

We can recognize and identify those natural mechanisms known to earth scientists: from above, solar activation of the atmosphere, geothermal activity beneath including vulcanism and tectonic plate activity which can be associated with the former and vice versa, earthquakes—seaquakes—tsunamis, all specific wind patterns, ocean current structures, and hydrological conditions resulting in or exacerbating either damaging floods or sudden heavy precipitation events or those dynamics yielding distribution of drought, aridification, or desertification.

Where the atmosphere's heat does activate itself (with human engineering contributions) is in our polar regions north and south. De-icing conditions in Greenland and Antarctica have been underway for decades. With total polar ice mass loss of between 8,800 and 9,200 gigatonnes (between 8.8 and 9.2 trillion metric tons) of grounded ice from Greenland and Antarctica since 2002, global mean sea level has risen by approximately 28 mm, or about 1.1 inches. Freshwater infusions on this scale (mass scale plus thermal expansion yielding conditions of sudden and increasing severity) are natural physical reactions to ambient overheating, as are those leading to de-iced polar regions, thawing permafrost zones, and melting mountain glaciers, et cetera. What is coming to us, for us, or at us has definite natural components. The atmosphere remains “purely natural” in the sense that its inherent mechanisms operate regardless of human observations, measurements, or interventions.

           It is the case, too, that human beings―each one of us and all of us together―have helped foment the present scope and scale of the overall problem. We are the ones who mindlessly assumed that our scant contributions in any local circumstance hardly possessed the cumulative force to help disrupt or accelerate or aggravate “purely natural” changes to climate or meteorological process. We are the ones who drove fleets of cars and trucks mindlessly, letting carbon spew without regard for cumulative effects. We are the ones who helped litter the planet and its oceans with tons of discarded plastic. We are the ones who have uncritically plugged into every single solitary proffered device that caring manufacturers have thrown at us so that we can entertain ourselves and each other without counting costs: radios and television sets, electric lights and air conditioners, stereos and computers, mobile phones and their many helpful apps.

Any of the foregoing examples constitute proximate causes or contributions to changing climate conditions: but contemporary scientists are hardly able to claim that any of these can justly be said to have uniquely “caused” changing climate—the exact deployment of all cumulative mechanisms permitting human beings to contribute to climate change on a global scale, the exact mechanisms for humans' aggravation of natural climate-changing climatic and meteorological processes, came from elsewhere.

            “Climate change” fails as a nominative because of its bland self-evidence: our planet's climate patterns change regardless. “Global warming” is inaccurate or misleading, strictly speaking, since the climate patterns now emerging can give us intensely hot summers (northern and southern hemispheres now appear equally affected) but just as likely can continue to yield (seasonally) local meteorological conditions of intense cold, ice storms, snowfalls, et cetera. “Global warming” can also fail somehow to remind us properly of the thermal dynamics distinguishing warming oceans from warming atmospheres and climates.

To give proper credit where due, one specific name suffices for what humanity likely will be dealing with for decades, centuries, or millennia to come, and that name is “Technogenic Climate Change”.

The term “anthropogenic” appears in many media accounts, but while suggesting accuracy and accountability, it fails because this term would misapply or misallocate the specific agency that created the conditions for the advent of climate change, no matter the additional specifically human biogenic contributions. The conditions for the advent of Technogenic Climate Change were not mindless natural processes suddenly running amok nor did they result from the spontaneous pining of humanity for vast disruptions and dislocations to global climates―the conditions resulted from the advent of applied science and applied technology in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: and because generations of empirical and “rational” scientists in the interim failed to anticipate the outcomes that they and their processes were generating, our entire globe now faces the daunting prospect of having to deal with the effects of Technogenic Climate Change.

Technogenic Climate Change was “invented” (however intentionally or inadvertently) by generations of our applied scientists and engineers, chemists, physicists, metallurgists, and applied technologists since the last half of the eighteenth century. Technogenic Climate Change was unleashed with the advent of early modern industrial production, the development of engineering methods and processes for fabrication, and the growth of industrial production capacity overall. It belched plumes and clouds of harmless black smoke as it roared down rivers clogging with more and more steamships for hauling passengers and goods. It roared down the tracks upon which raced locomotives and coal-fired steam engines. It vomited untold tons of carbonized residue through multiple nineteenth century military conflicts and vomited untold more tons with the advent of motorized transport beginning in the last decade of the nineteenth century. (Oh yes, and let's not neglect bovine and equine methane contributions.) To say nothing of the dynamics posed by the atmospheric testing of atomic and nuclear weapons across almost two decades, to say nothing of 24/7/365 (366) media production, broadcast, and distribution schedules, to say nothing of ozone degradation resulting from the ceaseless novelty of commercial flight, the glamour of international travel, and the glories of military aviation.

Faulting the planet for responding with inherent climate dynamism is no path to naming the actual culprit here. Blaming poor human beings for our guilty parts collectively only begins to account (partially) for human contributions. We have only dutifully worked with and aggravated atmospheric conditions with the tools and processes gifted to us by our scientific and technological elites: it is applied science and applied technology that have brought to Planet Earth the scourge of Technogenic Climate Change.  It remains important to recall just who to thank for this mess—because the same classes of applied scientists and applied technologists no doubt are ready to claim passionately and earnestly to be in a good position to help combat Technogenic Climate Change, to repair the ravages it wreaks across our globe.

The proper appellation “Technogenic Climate Change” can remind us (and them) of how irrational our ambitions to impose rational solutions on inert matter can be. In keeping with their historical performance in creating the conditions that are yielding the advent of Technogenic Climate Change, our classes of engineers, chemists, physicists, and metallurgists, with the rows and blocks of manufacturers supporting their pursuits, having already sustained efforts across more than a century in order to practice geoengineering without a license, are already volunteering plans and efforts to indulge in solar radiation modification experiments on our planet's only remaining atmosphere or to unfurl enormous umbrellas or parasols in space to block at least some of the solar radiation all life here yet depends upon. Perhaps we poor afflicted human beings can greet our philanthropists' and benefactors' claims with all the due skepticism with which we might properly have greeted their initial promises entire centuries ago.

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