The Time Paradox of Climate Change

The melting ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica are climate change’s most dangerous Big Bad, capable of altering the very face of the planet. All the adaptation we could muster can’t hold back the 25 feet or so of sea level rise that Greenland alone could unleash, not to mention the couple hundred more locked up at the planet’s southern extreme. And increasingly, scientists have found that these ice behemoths are teetering on the edge, approaching tipping points that will more or less lock in all or significant parts of their melt within only fractions of a degree from where things stand today.

One would think, then, that the world might show some increased urgency in the face of such imminent calamity. Miami, Shanghai, much of Bangladesh and the Netherlands, and many other places—gone. Trillions of dollars in real estate submerged, not to mention the sheer calamity of many millions of people seeing their homes lapped up by the waves and the geopolitical chaos such an event would undoubtedly spawn.

And yet. And yet emissions rose again in 2023. And yet demand for oil and gas will rise in 2024. And yet the supposedly landmark result of COP28, the United Nations climate talks held in December in Dubai, included in its agreement to transition away from fossil fuels massive loopholes and the traditional lack of teeth that plagues global agreements. The collective shrug at this Ice Sheet of Damocles can be chalked up to a strange quirk of this particular brand of apocalypse: 

The ice sheets are melting too slowly for us to stop them.

Even if we pass those tipping points, Miami and Shanghai will not disappear tomorrow. They won’t disappear next year, or next decade, or depending on which specific city we’re talking about, maybe not even within a couple of centuries. Even once melt is locked in, it will take a few hundred years or so for the ice sheets to disappear. That sort of time scale is not one that human brains and societies are particularly well equipped to deal with.

“When we talk about a few millimeters or less of global sea level rise per year, this is just not tangible for the average person—it doesn’t convey the urgency,” said Nils Bochow, a doctoral research fellow at the Arctic University of Norway, where he studies tipping points in Earth systems including in Greenland. “If I heard this number, I would respond: ‘And so?’”

The ice sheets represent the most glaring example of a fundamental issue behind human stagnation when it comes to climate change: time. The failure to address the world’s most existential risk is at root a temporal problem. Virtually none of the timelines—of emissions, of impacts, of solutions—line up in ways that society can effectively manage. Things take too long or deliver delayed impacts. The cause-and-effect of it all is stretched thin, too thin for a species so locked into our daily existence.

The more glass-half-full climate advocates often point to previous environmental victories as evidence that we can win on climate, too—but acid rain was falling on everyone right then, and cutting sulfur dioxide emissions would more or less stop the problem tomorrow. The same was largely true for polluted rivers catching on fire, or even the hole in the ozone layer. Unfortunately for us, climate change simply doesn’t work that way.

Examples of this temporal mismatch are everywhere. Start with carbon dioxide itself: every ton of CO2 sent skyward today will remain there for somewhere between a few hundred and a thousand years. That means that even dropping emissions to zero tomorrow leaves a whole lot of warming potential up there for generations to come.

“Time is an important variable when it comes to climate change because the future of our climate is dependent on the cumulative balance of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere over many, many years, not just the year at the end of the curve,” said Jonathan Foley, a climate scientist and executive director of the nonprofit Project Drawdown. He calls this issue the “time value of carbon.” 

The sheer inertia of the climate system is another example. Earth’s heating today is a result not just of the coal, oil, and gas burned last year, but also the fuels that were burned decades ago. If, starting today, emissions were to fall by 5% every year, the rate the planet is warming won’t really begin to change until the 2040s—potentially ugly fodder for those intent on casting doubt on energy transitions and the effectiveness of solutions.

Time rears its head again when it comes to the infrastructure we build. A fossil gas pipeline, a new oil drilling project, or a liquified natural gas export facility all have lifespans of at least a few decades, meaning the emissions they will facilitate don’t just count for the year they start operating but for a half-century beyond that. And generally speaking, once we build something, we use it until it’s used up.

For example, the Biden administration’s approval last year of the Willow Project, an $8-billion oil drilling venture owned by ConocoPhillips in a remote and pristine corner of Alaska, gives the world 600 million barrels of oil to burn into the 2050s. That’s past the generally agreed upon mid-century goal for reaching net zero and decades past when those gas-powered vehicles have theoretically become dinosaurs.

Meanwhile, some cleaner alternatives have similar timeline problems. The average emissions-free nuclear power plant, an oft-cited energy source for fixing climate change, now takes maybe a decade to build. The U.S. brought only its second new reactor this century online last year—the Vogtle 3 reactor in Georgia, with its sibling Vogtle 4 on its way this year. Construction on these reactors started in 2009 and was scheduled to finish seven years ago. Years of delays and billions of dollars in excess cost are now the norm for the industry, and counting on this power source for the near-term urgency of climate change seems increasingly like folly.

“Vogtle 3 and then Vogtle 4,” a former chair of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said last year. “And then most likely nothing.”

The timeline issue nuclear faces just doesn’t seem to register. Simply starting a new facility or two can feel like a step in the right direction, but if it doesn’t start generating clean power until 2040, and natural gas plants that are built much more quickly and cheaply fill that gap, that’s a couple of decades of emissions now in the atmosphere for a millennium.

It is those Arctic and Antarctic monsters, though, that paint this picture most clearly. Last year, a series of studies laid bare the precarious nature of the planet’s ice. One, by Bochow and his colleagues, found that Greenland’s threshold for an “abrupt ice-sheet loss” is likely between 1.7 and 2.3 degrees Celsius of warming—a range the world is probably going to approach within a decade or two. Another, led by Kaitlin Naughten of the British Antarctic Survey, showed that loss of the West Antarctic ice shelves—the floating extensions of the ice sheet—is already “unavoidable.” 

“For a while now this science has been pointing in a pretty gloomy direction,” Naughten told me late last year; she emphasized the timelines issue in particular. “The risk of West Antarctic collapse is sufficiently high that it is sensible to plan for it. However, the bulk of the changes will happen after our lifetimes—next century and beyond—and it can be hard for policymakers to think this far in advance.”

The asteroid is coming, but it remains too far away for enough people to care.

In 1983, the Environmental Protection Agency released a report titled “Can We Delay a Greenhouse Warming?” The report lays out the science of climate change as it was known at that time, much of which has largely been borne out since. It also includes what is in retrospect a mild but infuriating suggestion:

“Furthermore, the shift away from fossil fuels perhaps could be instituted more gradually and therefore less expensively if energy policies were adopted now rather than several decades later.”

Start now, save money and hardship later; face the timing mismatch head-on, and render it moot. Obviously, humanity failed to heed that advice, and now the energy transition is happening too slowly and too late to stave off some of the worst climate impacts. But if the best time to start that transition was 40 years ago, the second-best time is today. 

“If you need to cut emissions in half every decade for three decades in a row to get toward net zero… that’s a 7% discount rate every year,” Foley said. “Essentially that means every year you wait to deploy a climate solution you’ve lost 7% of its total effectiveness. That’s bad news. That’s like trying to save for retirement when you’re 64.”

It also means that a climate solution enacted today produces accumulating benefits across its lifespan. That could be seen as an opportunity. It’s why Foley is among those pushing hard for rapid deployment of proven solutions like solar, wind, and electric vehicles rather than the hype-driven technologies like nuclear power or direct air capture—if it can’t be built today, or even within a decade, the cost of those lost years is simply too great.

“They’re worse than useless,” he said of some of those pie-in-the-sky technologies. “They also become a distraction, beyond being a useless solution.”

Another way to think about it is that while “net zero in 2050” is a decent slogan and target, the journey to get there is just as important. “It’s cumulative emissions, not the emissions in 2050, that matter,” Foley said. A ton of CO2 emitted today keeps heating us up for 1,000 years; a ton avoided keeps that warming off the table forever.

To make use of climate change’s temporal issues requires internalizing the opportunity of rapid action and the severe cost of delay. Collectively, we need a better understanding of what’s on its way—even if the worst of it is a century off or more. 

“Unfortunately, I think there will only be a big societal change if the consequences impact first-world countries beyond their ‘pain threshold,’ or if the economy and wealth are endangered,” Bochow said. “We have to find a way to communicate the urgency of melting ice sheets—and climate change in general—more effectively.”