Eliminate fossil fuel pollution by 2050. Cut emissions in half by 2030. Expect sea level rise perhaps a meter or so by 2100 (or more than that in worst-case scenarios).
Those years -- 2030, 2050, 2100 -- can seem a way-off future, beyond the gravity of this-second news cycles. Who actually imagines, as part of daily life, what the year 2100 will look like? We're just trying to get through the US election cycle this year -- or through the coronavirus pandemic. We view the world through a right-now lens.
The artist and philosopher Jonathon Keats, however, finds daily, yearly and even decadal timeframes to be incredibly myopic. To try to get us to think outside our own time, Keats has developed a "Millennium Camera" that now is taking a 1,000-year exposure of Lake Tahoe in California. Keats has installed two other thousand-year cameras, one in Massachusetts and another in Arizona. More are in the works. The aim of this long-duration photography is to trigger new thinking about the planetary crisis that's caused by humanity's inability to stop burning fossil fuels and chopping down forests.
The Millennium Camera is of the pinhole variety. It contains an oil paint that bleaches slightly over time, capturing a time-lapse image of the landscape, which can be expected to shift -- perhaps becoming more arid -- beneath the forces of global warming. "If the landscape changes over time, the photographic plate will show multiple overlapping scenes or the motion blur of a scene that gradually morphs," Keats told me.
"It's like a whole movie compressed into a single frame."
The images from each camera won't be ready until the 31st Century.
Yep, 3020-ish.
"In geological terms, that's practically next week," he said.
In climate change terms, that's true, as well.
Not that we usually think of it that way.
"Pretty much all of the warming that we've seen will persist for 1,000 years," said Kirsten Zickfeld, an associate professor of geography at Simon Fraser University, who thinks about the year 3000 way more than most of us (which, outside sci-fi, is probably never). "Almost none of the warming we're experiencing today will have vanished."
The reason? Something like 40% to 50% of the carbon dioxide we're pumping into the atmosphere now will still be traveling through atmospheric and oceanic systems in the year 3000, Zickfeld said, ensuring that temperatures remain elevated and sea level rise continues to accelerate. The carbon that's junking up the atmosphere will last even longer than that -- perhaps 10,000 years, she said -- if we really keep polluting at out-of-control rates.
"Imagining that the decisions that we made in the past and that we make today will affect Earth and life on Earth for such a long period of time -- it's mind boggling," Zickfeld told me.
Knowing today's pollution lasts at least 1,000 years is potentially paralyzing news. But look at the inverse: If and when we decide to end the fossil fuel era, stopping the pollution that's hea
