No, we shouldn't return to the climate of the 18th century
Improving the climate is a better goal than trying to fight change.
This is a guest post by
, author of . It is part of Terraform, an essay collection about the future of our planet. Support the project by collecting the digital or print edition 👇🏻
We used to call it global warming, or the greenhouse effect. In the early 2000s, we collectively agreed to call it something new. We did this because it turned out we weren’t dealing with a straightforward heating of the atmosphere, but with a complex phenomenon, involving some areas getting wetter, drier, often hotter but sometimes colder, or hit with a variety of unusual weather events. On average the globe was and is warming up, due to the greenhouse effect of atmospheric CO2 capturing the heat of the sun, but the local effects are diverse and hard to predict accurately. So we called it climate change. This is what we’re fighting against: one of the big battles of this century.
There are many good reasons to be fighting climate change. If we let it happen, it will be damaging, harmful, costly. Crops will fail. Populated areas will become less inhabitable. Heat waves will kill more elderly people and spark more destructive wildfires. Species will go extinct. Coastal cities will be threatened by the sea and have to build expensive infrastructure like floodwalls. Most likely, we’ll adapt — few people seriously entertain the most extreme scenarios, where humanity’s survival is in jeopardy — but we will pay a high price for it.
So, better to prevent climate change altogether if we can. Or minimize it, at least. The less the Earth’s climate shifts, the better. We want the opposite of change: stasis. Keep things exactly as they were. Reject modernity, embrace tradition preindustrial average temperatures.
When it comes to the climate, most of us are radical reactionaries, fully ready to disrupt our entire economic system if it gives us an inkling of a chance to return to the lost golden age of the mid-18th century, when the atmospheric CO2 was below 280 ppm, and keep it that way forever.
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Imagine there was a similar movement to fight “political change” or “social change” or “technological change.” You don’t need to imagine very hard — lots of people fight all those things. We usually call them conservatives (or, in the case of technology, techno-pessimists or luddites).
There’s nothing wrong per se about conservatism. It arises from genuine and often reasonable concern about the negative consequences of change. Going deeper, there’s a subtle but strong theoretical motivation for it: cultural evolution. According to this view, a lot of what works well in society wasn’t carefully designed, but achieved after trial and error, much of it unintentional — just like biological evolution works through random mutations, selecting out the bad ones and keeping the good. A typical example of cultural evolution, told in Joe Henrich’s book The Secret of Our Success, is taboos against eating shark for pregnant Fijian women. The Fijians didn’t know the “real” reason why pregnant women shouldn’t eat shark (i.e. avoiding teratogenic toxins that could harm the unborn child), and may just invoke tradition or folk beliefs when asked about it. But the taboo persists because it really does help them. If a well-meaning reformer were to convince the Fijian pregnant women to eat shark in the name of progress, he might unknowingly lead to malformed children down the line.
Apply this argument to our modern societies, especially the rich and successful ones, and you can see why some people are attracted to conservative views. There are lots of ways for a society to fail, and we don’t really have that great an understanding of why some win and some lose. (This is unlike the simpler Fiji example, where modern science is effective enough to understand what is going on with shark toxins and replace tradition as the main enabler of enlightened decisions.) So — a conservative would say — we should at the very least be careful, maybe much more careful than we recently have been with political, social, and technological innovation.
But conservatism has an obvious flaw: almost everything can in fact be improved. To be maximally conservative would be to claim that what we have now is optimal. This is hard to reconcile with the rather noticeable existence of many current world problems. Not to mention that being against all change in any historical period would have been a great way to remain in a suboptimal state forever. (Examples of past suboptimal situations include infectious disease, slavery, child labor, low life expectancy, and widespread poverty.) Even if 2025 were somehow the bestest possible world, we were able to make it real only thanks to the opposing force to conservatism, which we can call progressivism.
Yet it would be a mistake to conclude from this that we need to go all in on progressivism. Trying to radically change society, to raze everything to a blank state and rebuild it from first principles, is all but certain to destroy useful cultural adaptations and cause further problems. So in practice, for any given political question, almost nobody is either maximally progressive or maximally conservative. Everyone’s a little bit of both. We all want to keep the good parts of society and improve the parts that don’t work well. Every disagreement lives in the details — what parts work well or not, how incremental or disruptive a proposed change should be. Those disagreements map more or less to a progressive-conservative (or left-right) axis.
Climate change is a glaring exception. A lot of people are fairly radical “climate conservatives” in that they want to keep the climate as it is, or roll it back to the climate of 250 years ago. Ironically, such people tend to vote for more progressive parties, since they’re the ones that advocate changing our policies to avoid climate change (conservatism and progressivism are complex, layered things!). Their opponents, who tend to vote for conservative parties, typically just don’t care much about the changing climate; to them, there are more important things to worry about. Virtually nobody is a “climate progressive” in the sense that they want to improve the climate.
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What would it mean to improve the climate? Not just let it change haphazardly, but change it in a directed way, such that it would be beneficial to humanity?
We can start by looking at the areas of the Earth where no or few people live. The first regions that come to mind are the polar ones. With rare exceptions for scientific or military purposes, almost nobody lives in Antarctica or in the northernmost areas of the Arctic. Settlements are sparse in most of Alaska, Canada, Greenland, Svalbard, or Siberia. If the climate in those areas were warmer, it would free up a lot of land for human habitation and resource exploitation, as well as new shipping routes. We know this is possible because for 85% of the Earth’s geological history, there was no continental ice in polar regions or anywhere on the planet; we are currently, and have been for about 34 million years, part of the remaining 15%, the ice age eras. Geologically, now is the exception. 56 million years ago, there was even a “brief” 200,000-year period called the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) when the Arctic region was not only free of ice, but had a subtropical climate, including palm trees and crocodiles.
It would probably not be a great idea to retvrn to that era, however. It’s in our interest to keep the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica on top of Greenland and Antarctica instead of in the ocean, where they would raise the sea level and threaten the cities where actual people live. The cold regions of the world also play a role in the global regulation of the Earth’s ecosystem, and provide a home for unique cultural diversity (e.g. the Inuit) and biodiversity (e.g. polar bears and emperor penguins) that couldn’t exist anywhere else.
So instead we turn to another type of region: deserts. Hot deserts cover 14% of the Earth’s land area, making this type of biome second only to polar climates. That’s a lot of land, much of which is unfit for dense human use.
Like the Arctic, there is evidence that some deserts used to harbor much more favorable climates. Unlike the Arctic, this is a relatively recent phenomenon. Between 14,500 and 5,000 years ago, the Sahara was not a desert, but a region of savannas, grasslands, and lakes, a time called “African humid period” or “Green Sahara.” It’s notable that 5,000 years ago coincides with the beginnings of civilization in Egypt and Mesopotamia — this is really not that long ago!
Also like the Arctic, there are unique human cultures, flora, and fauna in the deserts. There is also a lot of natural beauty:
So whatever we do, we shouldn’t get rid of all deserts. But there really are a lot of them, and besides, the vast majority of desert areas look less like picturesque sand dune seas and more like vast, boring plains strewn with rocks and the occasional shrub. It would be totally fine — and in the interest of the countries that contain those deserts — to reduce such areas by, say, half, in exchange for lush places where we can grow plants and live comfortably.
And to be sure, there have been many projects along those lines. Many initiatives to combat desertification exist, like the Great Green Wall in the Sahel region and the other Great Green Wall in China. There have also been projects to irrigate or vegetate specific areas, such as by filling the Qattara Depression in Egypt with water, or Libya’s Great Man-Made River, the largest irrigation project in the world.
Ambitious proposals include Atlantropa, the crazy Nazi Germany-era plan to build dams at Gibraltar and the Bosphorus to reduce the level of the Mediterranean Sea and create new land, as well as improve the climate of North Africa by also damming the Congo River and refilling Lake Chad. It also seems that the idea of a “Sahara Sea,” created by flooding the parts of the desert that are below sea level, has been around since the 19th century, and may even have undergone a revival in recent years. Similar proposals for the Australian desert have also been around for a long time.
Beyond these more or less local proposals, true control over deserts would probably involve some kind of global climate control. This would bring additional benefits in improving the more temperate climates too: we could perhaps reduce the occurrence of extreme weather events, bring more rain to areas that suffer from a temporary drought, and so on.
Global climate control would be, of course, enormously challenging, both technically and geopolitically. It would involve large-scale and scary geoengineering solutions: CO2 removal, albedo control, cloud seeding, ocean fertilization. It would require dealing with planetary coordination problems. But we probably need to do some of that anyway in order to fix the current undesired climate changes; and as Jason Crawford points out in “We should install a thermostat on the Earth,” it’s a much better goal to strive for than reducing our energy usage, which would mean less human flourishing. Once we have a working solution, we can use it to reshape the parts of the Earth that aren’t very useful to us, like a good chunk of the deserts, and create places for many more people, cultures, and plants and animals to thrive in.
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And yet: it seems hard to imagine that these projects would happen in the 21st century.
It’s already hard enough to see major land reclamation projects, such as building artificial islands or expanding the coastline near cities, happening in places that aren’t Dubai. And that’s despite knowing of many examples of coastal cities, including the likes of Boston, New York, Singapore, Hong Kong, and the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as much of the country of the Netherlands, that have greatly benefited from it in the past. Anything that modifies geography seems suspect, and will be fought. As if mapping out the entire world, and having access to detailed maps at our fingertips, had frozen the shape of the world. In many, perhaps most circles, “geoengineering” is a taboo word, the kind of thing that megalomaniac Nazi-era scientists do (like the aforementioned Atlantropa), as opposed to good faith attempts at making the Earth a better place.
And to be clear, opposition to land reclamation, climate control, and geoengineering in general is not baseless. There are many very good reasons to be conservative about this! Some of these reasons are rooted not in cultural but in biological evolution: the current ecosystems have evolved over a long time, and exist in a state of delicate balance that it would be all too easy to disrupt with even a well intentioned and thoroughly researched intervention. For example, purposefully introduced species have wreaked havoc in their new environment despite careful studies by biologists; it’s really hard to get this right. Undoubtedly, creating a new inland sea somewhere or constructing a dial to control the climate of Northern Africa would cause a bunch of new problems, including thorny political ones like “who gets to control the dial.” So, we don’t want to go full “progressive” on this and change geography just for the sake of change. Some degree of “environmental conservatism” is warranted.
But I worry that, just like for social conservatism, this form of conservatism has a tendency to go too far.
We see it in NIMBYism: environmentalism is commonly used as a way to block construction projects, for no other reason than wanting to keep things unchanged. We see it in the push to calculate the energy or water usage of everything we do, from flying in airplanes to using ChatGPT: it’s a way to justify not doing anything, since any action we might take would impose an environmental cost (although it’s worth pointing out that no, ChatGPT does not actually use much water). We see it in ecologically-minded antinatalism: bringing a new person into existence is one of the most progressive things you can do, since every new person dreams of changing the world, but many people justify not having children as a way to avoid an increase in resource consumption. We even see it in skepticism around the development of space technology: it’s common to hear that we shouldn’t colonize and terraform Mars, since we already messed up one planet and should avoid doing a repeat. As if the barren deserts of Mars, harboring no people or cultures or fauna and flora, had any value whatsoever to anyone!
The only goal of such a position is stasis. Whatever the current state of Mars or the Sahara or the climate of the Earth is, we should preserve that. It’s a simplistic way to think, and it’s also detrimental to human welfare.
It’s especially bad when “protecting the environment” rises to be the top value a person defends. Caring about the environment is virtuous when it is instrumental to other values, like the well-being of your family, friends, and other fellow humans. But when it is the one priority, it becomes meaningless. It’s conservatism for the sake of conservatism. A juvenile desire to avoid change, because you’re scared of the new problems that change will bring.
As a civilization, we shouldn’t be scared of change. We should first recognize just how “conservative” preserving the environment and climate is, despite total misalignment with political movements that call themselves conservative (which, somehow, are often the ones who want to blaze through environmental regulations and build more). And then we should strive to be a little more “environmentally progressive.” Not too much, just enough to become sensible centrists. The kind of sensible centrists who don’t hesitate to turn sterile deserts into lush oases, rather than viewing whatever the dawn of the Industrial Revolution looked like as some sort of golden ideal to return to.
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I'm loving this new essay series! Great ideas and innovative thinking all the way! This series should be read to pupils in schools everywhere to inspire the next generations of politicians, engineers and dreamers
The Elysian is always illuminating! Great article by Étienne Fortier-Dubois. Thanks for posing the "what if" questions.