Book Review -- Deep Future: The Next 100,000 Years of Life on Earth

Deep Future: The Next 100,000 Years of Life on Earth by Curt Stager

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Deep Future's goal is to create a science-based, reasoned context by which to evaluate the consequences of our burning the planet's reserves of hydrocarbons and injecting them into the atmosphere and oceans. It aims to inform and condition a reader's point of view to the question, How should we respond to our carbon crisis? Stripped down to its essence, Carl Stager's answer to that question is a simple “don't panic.” But this conclusion is, for me, unsatisfactory because I, unlike Stager the Earth scientist, am a stakeholder in the world we've yet to lose.

Not yet two centuries into a process of grossly overloading the planet's carbon cycle, Stager shows us an Earth that has already begun to manifest physical changes that will, according to the laws of physics, inexorably play out in coming millennium (assuming no artificial draw-down of atmospheric carbon, something Stager doesn't take up). He takes measure of that future in successive chapters on the rainforest, the temperate latitudes, the coasts, the poles, always with an eye to balance the good perturbations with the bad. In doing so he models outcomes based on a moderate carbon emissions scenario of 1000 gigatons and an extreme scenario of 5000 gigatons. To me this is where Stager shines. Earth is incredibly plastic in the author's prose, which mirrors the plasticity of rock, ice, and life over deep time as a point of natural fact. A future Earth will be utterly transformed by today's anthropogenic warming. It will be almost or entirely devoid of ice, with coastlines vastly altered by rising seas, oceans acidified, and profound changes to contemporary biota, much of which either will be extinct or will be well on the way. But Earth has seen this kind of warming before with all that it implies, including an epic warming event 800 million years ago when the north pole was a balmy shallow ocean ringed by conifer forests teaming with life. If we burn all our oil and coal in the coming centuries the planet will return to that state.

Stager assess his own canvassing of these transformations cautiously. For future human communities and natural communities there will be winners and losers, of course, but who are we to judge that? As Stager puts it, “How can we tell which changes are truly 'bad' for all or most of the parties involved, and which ones might simply come to seem normal or even desirably later on?”
Framed over at least 800 million years, huge swings in climate regimes are the norm. Ice ebbs and flows, seas rise and fall, life adapts. Because these changes are gradual and have happened before, Stager believes man will adapt to even the scariest sounding alterations ahead. In fact, if we keep our heads, which means for Stager, heeding the wisdom of impartial scientists for policy proscription, people are likely to do just fine. Stager's closing chapter really makes the case for this “don't panic” approach to climate change. In the long run it will all work out.

The problem for me, I guess, is that “just fine” is somebody's else new climate normal. It's not my Earth, nor yours for that matter. And while a person 10,000 years in the future is entitled to their own opinion, I'm wondering at the end of the book why Stager's preference for natural variability is any more valid than my preference for natural stasis, for polar bears and everyone living in Bangladesh. By my measure the big fat comet of carbon (Stager's favorite metaphor) that we're thrusting into the planet's carbon cycle is going to wreak havoc with the planet that I know and love over the coming centuries. It deserves to be called a carbon crisis. Stager counters that most of these dramatic changes are gradual on the human scale. For example, where I see flooding of a lot of coastal real estate and the resulting dislocation of a quarter of humanity Stager sees “zones of anticipation” where people adapt in intelligent, perhaps even beneficial ways to gradually rising seas. As they have done many times in climates past, animals and plants will also attempt to relocate but will find themselves hemmed in by man's presence and agenda. In this profound way climate change of the Anthropocene is truly novel. Eventually, many tens of thousands of years hence, the fossil-sequestered carbon that we are prodigiously liberating today will be cycled out of the atmosphere. Humanity then will be riding down the tail of the carbon comet. The earth will inexorably cool and dramatic changes to geology and ecology will proceed. Stager imagines future human communities, thriving in a much warmer climate regime in Greenland and the Arctic Circle, fretting over their own crisis of diminishing carbon that threatens to return biting cold to an ice-free planet.

The upshot of all this? Humans will survive. The Earth will endure. The next scheduled ice age will not occur, perhaps not the one after that. We have bequeathed to our progeny in Greenland an interior, highly productive deglaciated ocean and bountiful mineral wealth. Should you want to dispense real estate advice in your will that would be it. What happened to the 7-9 billion people in the 21st century and their companion lifeforms along the way? Deep Future doesn't say much about that because in the sweep of eons the big picture of process is the protagonist. One is tempted to call this callous but then that's not adhering to the rules of perspective. So I'll say that Stager's book is informative, entertaining, and provocative. Provocative books are worth reading and natural perturbations are in the eye of the beholder.





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