The scientists, the submariner and the “little cat feet” of climate change
PATRICK S. WOLFE
“The cataclysm can come in on little cat feet.” Wiki Commons, Tom Howard, UK, “Cat on a dry stone wall,” Aug. 2009.
“The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn’t happening at all,” David Wallace-Wells wrote in his famous 2019 book The Uninhabitable Earth.[1]
In May 2025, in The New Yorker, Andrew Marantz added that “the cataclysm can come in on little cat feet. The tremors can be so muffled and distant that people continually adapt, explaining away the anomalies.”[2]
A regular topic on the Comment page of my daily newspaper, the Times Colonist, which serves Victoria, B.C., and Vancouver Island, climate change was even more prominent during June 2025. On the 7th, a letter from a scientist stated: “It’s too late to stop this catastrophe, but never too late to lessen its consequences.” He forecast “what climate change portends,” including, eventually, “Crises in health care, food production and distribution [that] will overwhelm economies. Civilization as we know it will collapse…. probably… before 2100.”
A letter from a second scientist on the 11th, which spoke of “multidimensional cataclysm,” largely agreed with the first, but disagreed about the possibility of significant mitigation, maintaining “we do not have time to seriously lessen the consequences we have already unleashed.”
Another letter on the 11th was from a man who “served in submarines in both the Royal Navy and the Royal Canadian Navy.” (Thank you for your service.) He noted that on some days in the subs, “CO2 levels exceeded 5,000 parts per million, without any ill… effects on the crew.” He also noted that “Greenhouses routinely add 1,000 ppm of CO2… with no harm to greenhouse workers.” However, his conclusion, “For a healthy green planet, we can benefit from more CO2,” doesn’t follow.
The problem, according to a June 5 release from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California at San Diego, is that “Like other greenhouse gases, CO2 acts like a blanket, trapping heat and warming the lower atmosphere. This changes weather patterns and fuels extreme events, such as heat waves, droughts and wildfires, as well as heavier precipitation and flooding.”[3]
The Scripps release announced: “For the first time, the seasonal peak of carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere exceeded 430 [ppm at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s] Mauna Loa Observatory on Hawaii.” The May 2025 monthly average of 430.2 ppm represents “an increase of 3.5 ppm over May 2024’s measurement of 426.7 ppm.”[4] Before considering the significance of this milestone, there are three others that should be mentioned.
First, the 2015 Paris Agreement called “for ‘holding’ warming below two degrees, while ‘pursuing efforts’ to limit it to 1.5 degrees [Celsius].” Second and third, in Oct. 2018, the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change said that global CO2 emissions “would need to be halved by 2030 and reduced more or less to zero by 2050… to have a reasonable chance of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees.”[5] Although CO2 emissions “have been declining in many rich countries for years… that progress [has been] cancelled out” by increases in countries such as India and China.[6]
450 ppm is often discussed in relation to when Earth is expected to reach two degrees of warming (but it’s not a direct, one-to-one correlation). So, 430 ppm is a moderate milestone closing in on a much more notable, although not definitive, marker. According to Gwynne Dyer, the London-based, Canadian author, historian and journalist, 450 ppm is “the drop-dead level where you lose control of the climate, and basically you’re at its mercy [because] we’re now in the zone that [one or more of two dozen] feedbacks start to kick in [and] tipping points are crossed.”[7]
Presuming that feedback loops are triggered at some point, Dyer said that average warming of six degrees by 2100 “is not inconceivable.” Humanity “could lose 90%” of its population and such a loss could occur “in ways that might destroy civilization.”[8] If the current annual increase of 3.5 ppm holds steady, humanity should hit 450 ppm by May 2031. It must be stressed, however, that Earth, according to a Dec. 2020 study by “Carbon Brief,” is projected to likely exceed two degrees of warming between 2034 and 2052 (with a median year of 2043).[9]
“Most of Western Canada’s glaciers ‘doomed’ to disappear, new study finds.” This June 1st front-page story in the Times Colonist, is suggestive of just one aspect of the “multidimensional cataclysm” mentioned above. The story notes that “glaciers contribute 10% to 20% of annual flow and up to half of summer flow” in the Columbia River Basin, which is one of British Columbia’s largest sources of hydroelectric power.[10]
Writing in The Guardian in 2021, David Wallace-Wells offered the opinion that the climate that year was “the most benign we will ever see again.”[11]
David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, 2019, quoted in Arthur Krystal, “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” The New Yorker, Feb. 3, 2025, 54-60 (58). ↑
Andrew Marantz, “Is it Happening Here? What democratic backsliding looks like, The New Yorker, May 5, 2025, 26-35 (27). ↑
Elizabeth Kolbert, “Global Warning,” Talk of the Town, The New Yorker, Oct. 22, 2018, 23-24. (See “Recognizing the Coming Apocalypse” file for the article.) ↑
Marcus Gee, “Apocalypse Deferred,” The Globe and Mail, Sat., April 12, 2025, 06-07. (See “Recognizing the Coming Apocalypse” file for the article.) ↑
Gwynne Dyer, “Intervention Earth,” YouTube, Banyen Books & Sound, April 22, 2024 – https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=gwynne+dyer+%2B+banyen+books#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:e8daacde,vid:-7AxQpF3CdA,st:0 – accessed April 3, 2025, and June 4, 2025 – 3:50 to 4:59 (“In 1990, the amount [of greenhouse gases] in the atmosphere was 350 parts per million. It’s 425 and counting now [in 2024] and the drop-dead level where you lose control of the climate, and basically you’re at its mercy, is 450. We’re adding 2.4 parts per million every year…. We’ll be at 450 in ten years time, 2035 or 2034…. We’re now in the zone that feedbacks start to kick in, that tipping points are crossed.” Elizabeth Kolbert, “Letter from Greenland: When the ice melts: What the fate of the Arctic means for the rest of the Earth,” The New Yorker, October 14, 2024, 26-37 (29 – two dozen feedbacks). ↑
Gwynne Dyer, “Climate Change,” Royal Roads University, September 16, 2021 – https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=RRU+%2B+Gwynne+Dyer#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:959c32ec,vid:2A1FJJgDDu4,st:1184 – (YouTube, Sept. 17, 2021) – accessed April 3, 2025, 19:10 – 19:30 (two degrees Celsius of warming is the limit because that’s when scientists think we’ll start triggering non-linear events (a.k.a. feedback loops), 20:15 (“six degrees by the end of the century, it is not inconceivable”), 22:22 – 22:40 (“90 per cent”, “might destroy civilization”). ↑
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-when-might-the-world-exceed-1-5c-and-2c
-of-global-warming/ – accessed July 16, 2025.↑
Stefan Labbé (Glacier Media), “Most of Western Canada’s glaciers ‘doomed’ to disappear, new study finds,” Times Colonist, Sun., June 1, 2025, A1, A2. ↑
The scientists, the submariner and the “little cat feet” of climate change
The scientists, the submariner and the “little cat feet” of climate change
PATRICK S. WOLFE
“The cataclysm can come in on little cat feet.” Wiki Commons, Tom Howard, UK, “Cat on a dry stone wall,” Aug. 2009.
“The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn’t happening at all,” David Wallace-Wells wrote in his famous 2019 book The Uninhabitable Earth.[1]
In May 2025, in The New Yorker, Andrew Marantz added that “the cataclysm can come in on little cat feet. The tremors can be so muffled and distant that people continually adapt, explaining away the anomalies.”[2]
A regular topic on the Comment page of my daily newspaper, the Times Colonist, which serves Victoria, B.C., and Vancouver Island, climate change was even more prominent during June 2025. On the 7th, a letter from a scientist stated: “It’s too late to stop this catastrophe, but never too late to lessen its consequences.” He forecast “what climate change portends,” including, eventually, “Crises in health care, food production and distribution [that] will overwhelm economies. Civilization as we know it will collapse…. probably… before 2100.”
A letter from a second scientist on the 11th, which spoke of “multidimensional cataclysm,” largely agreed with the first, but disagreed about the possibility of significant mitigation, maintaining “we do not have time to seriously lessen the consequences we have already unleashed.”
Another letter on the 11th was from a man who “served in submarines in both the Royal Navy and the Royal Canadian Navy.” (Thank you for your service.) He noted that on some days in the subs, “CO2 levels exceeded 5,000 parts per million, without any ill… effects on the crew.” He also noted that “Greenhouses routinely add 1,000 ppm of CO2… with no harm to greenhouse workers.” However, his conclusion, “For a healthy green planet, we can benefit from more CO2,” doesn’t follow.
The problem, according to a June 5 release from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California at San Diego, is that “Like other greenhouse gases, CO2 acts like a blanket, trapping heat and warming the lower atmosphere. This changes weather patterns and fuels extreme events, such as heat waves, droughts and wildfires, as well as heavier precipitation and flooding.”[3]
The Scripps release announced: “For the first time, the seasonal peak of carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere exceeded 430 [ppm at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s] Mauna Loa Observatory on Hawaii.” The May 2025 monthly average of 430.2 ppm represents “an increase of 3.5 ppm over May 2024’s measurement of 426.7 ppm.”[4] Before considering the significance of this milestone, there are three others that should be mentioned.
First, the 2015 Paris Agreement called “for ‘holding’ warming below two degrees, while ‘pursuing efforts’ to limit it to 1.5 degrees [Celsius].” Second and third, in Oct. 2018, the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change said that global CO2 emissions “would need to be halved by 2030 and reduced more or less to zero by 2050… to have a reasonable chance of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees.”[5] Although CO2 emissions “have been declining in many rich countries for years… that progress [has been] cancelled out” by increases in countries such as India and China.[6]
450 ppm is often discussed in relation to when Earth is expected to reach two degrees of warming (but it’s not a direct, one-to-one correlation). So, 430 ppm is a moderate milestone closing in on a much more notable, although not definitive, marker. According to Gwynne Dyer, the London-based, Canadian author, historian and journalist, 450 ppm is “the drop-dead level where you lose control of the climate, and basically you’re at its mercy [because] we’re now in the zone that [one or more of two dozen] feedbacks start to kick in [and] tipping points are crossed.”[7]
Presuming that feedback loops are triggered at some point, Dyer said that average warming of six degrees by 2100 “is not inconceivable.” Humanity “could lose 90%” of its population and such a loss could occur “in ways that might destroy civilization.”[8] If the current annual increase of 3.5 ppm holds steady, humanity should hit 450 ppm by May 2031. It must be stressed, however, that Earth, according to a Dec. 2020 study by “Carbon Brief,” is projected to likely exceed two degrees of warming between 2034 and 2052 (with a median year of 2043).[9]
“Most of Western Canada’s glaciers ‘doomed’ to disappear, new study finds.” This June 1st front-page story in the Times Colonist, is suggestive of just one aspect of the “multidimensional cataclysm” mentioned above. The story notes that “glaciers contribute 10% to 20% of annual flow and up to half of summer flow” in the Columbia River Basin, which is one of British Columbia’s largest sources of hydroelectric power.[10]
Writing in The Guardian in 2021, David Wallace-Wells offered the opinion that the climate that year was “the most benign we will ever see again.”[11]
A writer and historian, Patrick S. Wolfe is the author of A SNAKE ON THE HEART: HISTORY, MYSTERY, AND TRUTH – THE ENTANGLED JOURNIES OF A BIOGRAPHER AND HIS NAZI SUBJECT, the story of a member of the Dutch SS who became a Canadian foster parent and social worker.
-of-global-warming/ – accessed July 16, 2025.↑
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