Our shared climate responsibility

Living in the mountains of southern Oregon, I’ve explored the wilderness around me. Now the summer solstice approaches, and the days lengthen. I look for patterns on every trail. Why are wildflowers distributed the way they are? Do slight differences in soil, slope and exposure to sunlight determine their spatial distribution? Is elevation a factor in where different flower types can flourish? What controls the alignment of tree moss in a preferred direction? Wind? Sunlight?

It’s tough to get out of this habit of pattern analysis. Pattern analysis is my job. It’s my life. I’ve spent decades searching for — and finding — coherent “fingerprints” of human influence embedded in noisy climate data.

My home in the mountains is “paradise with an asterisk.” Many of the residents in this conservative part of the world have bought into false claims that human-caused climate change is a “hoax” or a “conspiracy.” That’s the asterisk. Paradise is accompanied by willful ignorance.

While climate science is ignored by many who live here, paradise is being lost. Snowpack is diminishing. Glaciers on Mt. Shasta are rapidly receding. Water is becoming an ever-scarcer resource. Summer heatwaves are ramping up in intensity, frequency and duration. Fire season is lengthening, and fire weather is transitioning to “never seen anything like this before”.  

The proximate cause of these connected climatic dots is fossil fuel burning, which has increased atmospheric levels of heat-trapping greenhouse gases, warming Earth’s atmosphere by nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit since the Industrial Revolution. Substantially more warming is on the way if we cannot and will not rapidly curb our enthusiasm for “liberating carbon.” More impacts on human health.  More pressure to migrate to areas with lower risk of climate change threats. More conflict arising from climate change diasporas. More species headed for extinction. More paradise lost.  

This is all happening on our watch. We are culpable. We are responsible.

Recently, I was prompted to think about responsibility by a trip into town for my weekly grocery shopping. After less than 20 minutes in the store, I returned to my car and saw that someone had rammed the left rear side. The car was a mess.  

The person responsible drove off without even leaving a note. It all went down in a busy parking lot with dozens of cars around. In broad daylight. In the middle of a weekday afternoon. Pretty brazen stuff.  

It looks like the culprit will avoid responsibility. The police have not identified the hit-and-run driver. There were no witnesses — or if someone did see what happened, they were unwilling to become involved in any unpleasantness.

Most of us living in this country are both witnesses and contributors to the ongoing damage that is happening to Earth’s climate system. We cannot — like the hit-and-run driver did — simply ignore the damage. We cannot — like possible witnesses to the hit-and-run — simply look away and rationalize inaction by telling ourselves that human-caused climate change is none of our business.

It is, in fact, our business to deal with the climate changes our actions have wrought. Climate change is our responsibility. It’s happening on our watch.

I’d like to think that we are better than the person who rammed my car. While each of us has life and breath, we cannot depart silently, without a note on the windshield, leaving the cleanup of our planetary life-support system to future generations.    

Ben Santer is a climate scientist, a visiting researcher at UCLA’s Joint Institute for Regional Earth System Science and Engineering, and a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur fellow. He was the lead author of Chapter 8 of the 1995 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and has been a contributor to all six IPCC reports.