Deep Future: The Next 100,000 years of Life on Earth

Review by BRETT WARNKE

Curt Stager, author of Deep Future: The Next 100,000 Years of Life on Earth; Thomas Dunne Books, 304 pp. Book Release, US., March 15.

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“Save the Carbon!” It’s not the most popular bumper sticker you’ll see as you speed through a crunchy college town but paleoecologist Curt Stager argues it is not merely a thoughtful slogan, it is a prescient one. In his beautiful new book Deep Future: The Next 100,000 Years of Life on Earth, Stager has elevated science writing to the level of literature and made the case for conserving carbon and the consideration of a changing climate’s consequences.

A sometime writer for National Geographic and a current Professor at Paul Smith’s college in New York, Stager’s arresting book informs us what scientists already know: Humanity has prevented the next ice age and is making decisions that will impact thousands of years of human civilization. This is the book about the next 100 millennia. (Other scribbler’s should note that this is the best idea I’ve yet heard of for keeping a book in print!) Deep Future is a scientific work with a human narrative; an empirical study of a world changing utterly and the horrors and payoffs to come.

“I was a skeptic about climate change,” he admitted in an interview. But once Stager was challenged by physicist Dr. James Hansen to look up the weather records for the Adirondack Mountains, he knew he was wrong. “I added it up and the numbers are in. Now I can see it is due to us.”

Stager welcomes the reader into the Anthroposcene—the Age of Humans. Whether we know it or not the carbon we release and the nukes we have tested have left prints on this planet and 21^st century humans will determine both the acceleration and duration of future warming. But Stager admonishes his readers early on that climate change is “not just a heart-wrenching litany of gloom.” Instead Deep Future excellently summarizes what is known—namely, that modern living has unwittingly causing dramatic climate changes—and Stager offers a global tour through labs and exotic locations anticipating possible decision points and their consequences. Humanity will exist in 100,000 years, he argues. The culprits of our possible destruction—asteroids, disease, nuclear war, a dead sun—are unlikely, impossible, or unthinkably far-off. And since humans have already vaporized 300 Gigatons of fossil carbon and will certainly be around for further millennia, Stager ponders the crucial question: “What will the ‘deep future’ of the Anthroposcene be?”

“I felt like I was a pioneer in a new world,” he said “I had spoken with David Archer (author of The Long Thaw) and he and others were working on modeling--demonstrating how warm and how cool the weather is going to get. But they haven’t yet thought deeply about the future.”

Stager cites meticulous calculations from numerous climatologists, ecologists, glaciologists and uses Archer’s emission models to peer into the mysteries of the future. Then, using the silent stones beneath us he describes a “Super Greenhouse” world 55 million years ago. This is what will happen if humanity hurls itself towards the extreme scenario of releasing 5,000 Gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere. What would this waterworld of pole-to-pole warmth look like? Well, scientists already know; the earth has been there and done that.

“A Super Greenhouse is not just some doomsayer’s morbid dream,” he writes. “It really can happen.” And if the world returns to such a climate it would be a “scarlet mark of shame” on future sediment records. Having now prevented the next ice age that would have turned Canada into an igloo, Stager informs us that the 100,000 year heat spike we have initiated will descend. But then what? Cooling. Animals which migrated to warmer regions of North America and Siberia will, like the doomed polar bears, belugas, Arctic Cod, and walruses before them, be trapped.

Using the most recent data, Stager does not engage in the splashing death-row spectacle that Al Gore and other non-scientist activists have predicted. He admits that a “paleoecologists panic button might not be so easily pressed.” Using examples from Venice to Cameroon to Shanghai Stager explains that in most cases sea level rising will be “slow, unrelenting, costly, exasperating, but rarely deadly to humans.”

Our emissions are already creating winners and losers. A recent article in The Scientific American laid out population density and rain patterns for areas as far apart as Mozambique, Mexico and Vietnam. In these and other regions, who will determine how future resources are allocated? Who will organize the inevitable human and animal mass migrations? How will resource battles be fought? The developed world will be the greatest beneficiary as minerals and resources hidden beneath the ice become available. Stager writes that “shipyards, refineries, and storage facilities will turn formerly remote outposts into major transport hubs and busy ports of call.” This means we must readjust or at least contemplate how we talk about what is happening. Is the Arctic being destroyed or is its biodiversity increasing? Is southern Florida’s demise more important than a tenth of the world’s oil reserves now on tap? And which species are “good”? For every mollusk that acidifies in an increasingly carbonized ocean, pteropods, jellyfish, anemones, scallops, and sea cucumbers are beginning to flourish.

Stager’s is not without targets. He goes easy on “contrarians,” the mild term he slaps on the wrong-headed loudmouths and status quo skeptics who are often funded by the biggest polluters. And again and again he reveals his impatience with a media he argues is driven by front-page spectacle rather than the slow and more disturbing truth of climate change. But surely he protests too much given the rigorous research by major newspapers, bloggers, and public intellectuals on this subject.

But his warning for us to “Save The Carbon” is a serious one. Shouldn’t our descendents, when threatened with a future ice age, have the option to set a few mountains ablaze to warm things up a bit? Stager’s finely-written and compelling analysis poses queries our busy species has not yet considered. Since we’ll be here a while, Stager’s book is (and will be) a nice way to spend our remaining time.