Commentary: Stuck On Coal, And Stuck For Words In A High-Tech World

Human progress, Loren Eiseley wrote in 1954, has largely been a climb up the heat ladder from one energy source to the next. Each has been more convenient or potent or economical than the last. No one lugs firewood to warm a high-rise apartment building in Chicago.

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But the climb has stalled. The potential of the atom has been sharply limited by safety and security questions and fusions persistent hurdles. Sunlight, identified as far back as Thomas Edisons time as the ultimate energy source, is still costly to transform into electricity on a large scale.

As a result, 21st-century civilization is still stuck on a 19th-century rung — the coal step on that heat ladder — while two billion people in Africa and other struggling regions still cook meals on smoldering dung and sticks, with a million-plus dying young each year from lung ailments as a result. Many in such places would love nothing more than a lump of coal.

And now science says we cant afford to stay where we are much longer.

The huge projected expansion in coal burning over the next few decades, mainly in China and India but also in the United States and parts of Europe, will (without new technology) produce a buildup of long-lived carbon dioxide sufficient to warm the atmosphere, erode ice sheets and raise and acidify seas for many centuries. (Burning oil matters too, of course, but that is seen as a more tractable issue by many experts.)

Its no wonder that scientists immersed for decades in this problem are running out of metaphors in pressing the public to act — whether the choice is a surge of research on nonpolluting energy technologies, a rising tipping fee for continued greenhouse-gas emissions, or a combination of these and other steps.

James E. Hansen, the top NASA climate scientist, has been lauded and criticized in recent days for accusing society of willfully ignoring a tragedy unfolding in plain sight in the same way millions of people did as the Holocaust swept Europe. As I noted last week in a post to the blog Dot Earth, he likened coal trains that serve high-emitting power plants to death trains. In response, Dr. Hansen distributed an essay apologizing for, and justifying, his language and calling for better ideas.

It is hard for me to think of a different, equally poignant example of the foreseeable consequence faced by fellow creatures on the planet, Dr. Hansen wrote. Suggestions are welcome.

One interesting experiment intended to cast the climate problem in a new way can be found at DeSmogBlog.com, where people are invited to write 100-Year Letters discussing climate with their great-grandchildren.

Keep in mind that sociologists studying global warming dont hold out much hope that any language — if not accompanied by a big kick from nature — can motivate people to embrace the need to leave the comfort zone of coal.

In a 2006 paper in the journal Climatic Change, subtitled Why Global Warming Does Not Scare Us (Yet), Elke U. Weber of Columbia University listed various reasons why people fail to absorb messages on long-term risks.

The reasons include established sociological concepts like the finite pool of worry hypothesis, in which daily struggles swamp even life-threatening long-term risks (not finding the time to replace worn tires) and single-action bias, exemplified by a 1991 study finding that radiologists looking for tumors or other problems in X-rays tend to halt their search after discovering the first one, leaving additional problems undetected.

As a journalist, of course, it would be hard for me to abandon the notion that language can help society meaningfully address the entwined energy and climate challenges. Ill be posting some fresh efforts by experts to describe the situation and offer solutions. You can post yours, as well, at nytimes.com/dotearth.

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