It's Too Late to Prevent Global Warming, but Maybe We Can Fix It | Opinion

As more than 8 million people breathed—and saw—the air of New York City last week, climate change went from faraway abstraction to clear and present danger.

On Wednesday, the smoke lingered on a trip south from the city. It was thinning, yes, but even the beautiful view from the Susquehanna Bridge, in Maryland, was enveloped and lost.

Welcome to the future. It's exactly what scientists—across a dozen disciplines—told us it would be.

The smoke that choked the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, parts of the Midwest, and even the South, is being generated by hundreds of uncontrolled wildfires in Canada, our "nice" neighbor to the north that has universal health care, an allegedly more enlightened and liberal mindset—and some of the dirtiest oil on Earth. While these fires may have been sparked by lightning, they are anything but natural.

Increasing heat is causing droughts all over the world, and that has led to rivers drying up and tinder-dry conditions in once-lush forests. Still, seeing smoke engulf Manhattan, turning it into another Beijing or New Delhi was startling to most of us.

In some sense, believers have been waiting for climate change for at least 40 years, when the concept first entered our minds and the world started to become aware. While we've been waiting for an ice age or a tsunami or air that can't be breathed—for climate change to catch up with the movies, it was happening all around us.

The ice caps are melting, sea levels are rising, sure, but we can still take our beach vacations, right? Droughts and heatwaves are engulfing the planet, but other than enjoying the mild winters and staying inside during the brutal summers, there has been little catastrophic impact for most people living in the United States. Or has there?

Strong, more frequent storms have been blamed on global warming—but not any particular storm. It's all about increased probabilities. The best, all scientists can say is that a singular event has been exacerbated or become more likely because of climate change.

The smoke from Canada's wildfires isn't going to get better. There will be some fluctuation in the next few years—as there always is—but the trend is clear and the consequences obvious. Experts are once again recommending that we all wear masks while outside.

Oh boy.

Last week was like that scene in any science fiction movie worth its salt, when the giant flying saucer appears over the White House and either issues an ultimatum—or doesn't. You know what's coming next, but the director lets the tension build. When the White House or Empire State Building finally goes up in smoke, it's a moment of catharsis.

We can only hope last week was cause for many people to finally see the danger, and for a monumental change to be made. It's time to make science fiction real.

Anyone 50 years old and younger probably won't believe how much a real "moonshot" costs. The space program was incredibly expensive, peaking at about 5 percent of the national budget in 1965. Hundreds of billions of dollars were spent, new technologies created, the knowledge of our universe greatly expanded, and the Soviet Union put in its place.

Cool.

The climate crisis, on the other hand, is existential, not just for Americans but for everyone on the planet. Do we spend 1 percent of our federal budget to fix it?

Nope.

We need to take the energy—and money—that we once used to win a race, to now save our race. We need massive spending on geoengineering.

The time for emissions cuts has passed. It would be nice if it hadn't, but it has. The effects of global warming are already all around us and, like most genies, won't go back in the bottle. I'd also point out that no one is particularly interested in cutting emissions anyway—regardless of the salve to the soul provided by electric cars.

By the time we get all the internal combustion vehicles off the road... well, fuhgeddaboudit. And cars are only part of the problem. Plus, no one has the will or interest to lower greenhouse gas emissions, no matter how many trips to Paris they take. Plus we have a lot of people who simply seem to enjoy fossil fuels.

So, it's time to science our way out of this.

Will it be carbon capture of some kind? Planting more algae in the ocean? Will we decide to darken our own skies to cool the Earth down?

What we need to do is whatever works. And how do we get there? We need money, a worldwide scientific body to evaluate proposals, and money.

It'll be incredibly hard to counteract or suck up greenhouse gases at the kind of scale that needs to happen. Maybe we can't even do it, but we must try, and we must put real money behind it. Five percent of the budget anyone?

One last point, it doesn't have to be the United States alone that bends its budget to create these new technologies.

Let's go, China, you're up.

Jason Fields is a deputy opinion editor at Newsweek.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.