Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
–Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”
On a clear winter day the world starts to spin backward. The sun rises over New York City, sputters at its midday height, and then sets eastward over the Atlantic. The trade winds reverse course; the ocean currents turn retrograde. Rain begins to fall in the Sahara and stops over the Amazon. Within a year the rainforest is burning, leaving behind scorched ground that will soon be desert. Pack ice forms along the western coast of France. The king delivers a Christmas message from a London palace blanketed in snow. Russia turns balmy and pleasant. Soon, the first Siberian wines make their way to market. But only the lucky ones can afford them. Most people are on the move, searching for food, water, or home, carried backward together into an uncertain future.
The world ends. Another begins. It hums along happily for decades, then centuries, until suddenly the ground shudders. An enormous volcanic eruption smears sulfuric acid into the stratosphere, where it crystallizes into dust particles that block out the sun. The world is plunged into gloom. In some places, it rains every day for months. Crops fail, food prices spike, and everyone looks for someone else to blame. Obliging demagogues step up with lies and scapegoats, promising to restore the beautiful world that used to be.
Another world spins up. Its weather changes with the seasons and the random back-and-forth movement of air and water. There are hot days and cold ones, stretches of pleasant weather interrupted by the occasional catastrophe. But none of it matters, because this is an empty world. There is no one to enjoy it. There is no one to change it.
More worlds come into existence. Some are completely covered in water; others have none. There are cold planets that look like giant cosmic snowballs and warmer worlds with high seas and no ice. Their atmospheres are different: Some have no ozone layer, or less oxygen, or more gases that trap the heat escaping from the planet below. The worlds proceed until the inevitable catastrophe: volcanic eruptions that blot out the sun, ice ages, abrupt changes to the composition of the sky. They run their course and end when I tell them to.
I made these worlds, all of them. I’m an Earth scientist, and I study the planet using climate models made from equations and code. On these digital worlds, I can set off volcanoes, take away the wind, and make the world spin backward. I can blot out the sun at will. I can change the chemistry of the atmosphere with a few keystrokes. I can imagine people living in these worlds. Every day, I do terrible things to them. No one cares at all. None of it is real. It’s impossible to feel sad or angry or frightened about things that happen to an Earth that exists only on a hard drive.
“Scientists have used climate models for decades to see possible futures. Now these long-predicted changes are coming to pass.”
Kate Marvel
Author, Human Nature
But these fake planets are the best way we have of understanding the real one, both as it is now and how it will be. Scientists have used climate models for decades to see possible futures. Now these long-predicted changes are coming to pass. It’s not just the digital atmosphere that’s full of greenhouse gases; it’s our atmosphere. It’s not a toy planet burning; it’s our beloved Earth. Climate change isn’t just happening to ones and zeros encoded on electronic switches. It’s happening here. It’s happening to me—to us. And believe me, I have feelings about that.
I’m angry that we’ve known that greenhouse gases cause global warming for more than a century and have done very little to stop emitting them. And then I remember where these emissions come from and feel appropriately guilty. I’m sad, desperately so, when I think about all the things we’ll lose. I’m afraid of the disasters I know are coming. I’m proud and surprised and hopeful and utterly in love with our beautiful world. I feel so much.
Isn’t this unscientific? Aren’t researchers supposed to be perfectly objective, unemotional, and neutral about the world we study? I can’t be. I need to declare a conflict of interest regarding Earth: Everyone I love lives here. But I do worry that by saying this, I’ll leave myself vulnerable to attack, maybe even undermine climate science more broadly. I can imagine plenty of bad actors claiming that my humanity clouds my judgment. I’m also aware that I live in a culture that has words for emotional women, none of which are compliments. Still, I am a scientist at heart, which means I always want more data. I haven’t been trained to ignore things this important. So I think we should be as honest about observing and documenting our emotions as we are about measuring rainfall or soil moisture. Pretending we feel nothing about our changing world doesn’t make us objective. It makes us liars.
I wrote this book for three reasons. First, I wanted to share some of the science behind climate change, to show what we know and how we know it. Second, I wanted to explain a little about how it feels to do this science in a rapidly changing world. Third, I wanted to write about everything I felt. Stories about climate change often demand a single, specific emotional response: panic, outrage, despair. But I don’t think there’s any “right” way to feel about what’s happening. I’ve been studying Earth for years, and it’s a complicated place: vulnerable and resilient, wonderful and awful. How could it ever be possible to collapse a planet’s worth of feelings into something small and simple?
“We feel anger, grief, hope, love, guilt, surprise, pride, fear, and wonder. We break the laws. We’re hard to predict. But it’s we who will shape the future.”
Kate Marvel
Author, Human Nature
I called this book Human Nature because it feels like a good description of our interfered-with little planet. Human beings have changed the atmosphere and the land surface and the oceans; there is no place on Earth untouched by our influence. But the title is also a provocation. I don’t believe there’s any such thing as “human nature”—at least not in the sense of immutable characteristics that make a particular outcome inevitable. I’m quite familiar with things that behave in a fixed way: laws of physics, equations that will always hold true, objects without emotions. But people can’t be forced into equations like these. An object in motion will remain in motion until its trajectory is altered by an outside force, but a person in motion will go on until she feels like stopping. There are no hard physical laws that precisely determine the futures of human beings or human societies. Humans are stupid and mean but also brilliant, kind, and rule-abiding, and sometimes all of these things within the course of an hour. We feel anger, grief, hope, love, guilt, surprise, pride, fear, and wonder. We break the laws. We’re hard to predict. But it’s we who will shape the future.
A world begins. In its acidic oceans float the corpses of suffocated sea creatures. The coastlines are swamped by rising waters. In between wide swaths of wasteland are a few burning forests. The Mediterranean is almost as dry as the Sahara, and the west coast of North America swings wildly between drought and flood. The sky is laden with carbon dioxide and methane, and the temperature steadily rises. Terrible things come to pass.
I end that world. I start another. It’s similar in many ways to the previous nightmare planet. There are heat waves and droughts, a thousand-year flood every decade or so. Sea levels are still high. But after decades of work, humans have finally ceased to put carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere. The temperature, still dangerously high, no longer climbs. This is a planet coming to a new equilibrium, slowly adjusting to its new reality, making peace with the way it is now.
Another world exists, a better one, maybe the best of all possible worlds. By the middle of the century, human beings not only emit no carbon dioxide but have also learned how to remove a little from the atmosphere. Nearly every structure is covered in solar panels, as are roads, canals, parking lots, even some farms. Most people live in pleasant green cities. On the urban outskirts, restored forests thrive. The world is far from perfect: It’s hotter than now, more dangerous, with higher seas. Even in Utopia, the climate conditions under which human civilization developed are gone forever.
I don’t know which of these worlds is more likely. Science says that as long as human beings emit greenhouse gases by cutting down trees and burning fossil fuels, the planet will keep getting warmer. Physics says this will mean higher sea levels, heavier rainfall, worse and longer droughts. It says nothing about how we should feel about this. And it says nothing about what we’ll decide to do. The future remains uncertain. But I’m sending my children there, and they are never coming back. I think about it every day. And then, I feel.
Biome
Join our membership community. Support our work, receive a complimentary subscription to Atmos Magazine, and more.