Aspiring writers are often advised to “write about what you know.” I know something about the process of identifying human fingerprints in observed climate records. And I know something about dark places. This is about both — climate science and dark places.
Let’s start with the dark places. Back in the 1970s, I went on a caving trip to Gaping Ghyll in Yorkshire. It’s a spectacular cave, with a main chamber over 300 feet high that’s open to the surface. A stream plunges through this opening, free-falling to the bottom of the chamber. When the lighting is right, the waterfall formed by the stream is transformed into a cascade of jewels. It’s a thing of beauty.
Our team of eight cavers planned to do a “through trip” in Gaping Ghyll. One group of four went in one entrance. The other foursome tackled a second entrance. We arranged to meet at the bottom of the main chamber. After meeting up, each group would exit the way the other group had entered—thus the “through trip”.
Our group’s entry route involved a trip through a “duck”—a short section of passageway in which the water level reaches the rock ceiling of the passage. You dive through the duck to reach the air-filled passage on the other side, and then continue along the passage to the main Gaping Ghyll chamber. I had to trust myself and all who had done this before me. Intellectually, I knew that there was air on the other side of the duck. Sometimes, though, rational intellectual thought competes with a far more primitive fear — in this case, fear of not being able to breathe.
Those few minutes in complete darkness were a remarkable experience. Physically, I’ve never been to a darker place than the far side of the duck in Gaping Ghyll. But metaphorically, my job as a climate scientist has taken me to darker places.
My professional experience of darkness was in congressional hearings, where the lightless depths of willful ignorance are publicly displayed. The U.S. Congress is a place where even today, many members of one political party deny the reality and seriousness of human-caused climate change, despite overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary.
Such willful ignorance is a deeper, more profound darkness than anything I encountered in Gaping Ghyll. It’s a darkness of the soul. A darkness of morality and integrity. A darkness that is willing to sell out our children’s best hopes — their hopes for a future on a life-sustaining planet with a stable climate system.
The Inflation Reduction Act, which recently passed through Congress and was signed into law, is a ray of light in this human darkness. It represents a path toward a less dangerous future — a future in which the United States could become a world leader in developing and deploying clean, low-carbon energy sources. A future in which rationality wins out over baser irrational fears and tribalism. A future centered on the well-being of many rather than the well-being of a select few.
To paraphrase Joni Mitchell, I’ve looked at darkness from both sides now — from experiencing intense, purely physical darkness, and from observing the darkness of willful ignorance. The latter is far more terrifying. We must vote for those who seek to keep us out of that darkness.
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.