Climate Scientists Steffen and Knorr defend Franzen's position

Fact Checking the Climate Crisis: Franzen vs. Facebook on False New. Wolfgang Knorr and Will Steffen. Feb. 19, 2020.

Critique of Climate Feedback fact checking exercise of an article by the writer Jonathan Franzen in the New Yorker, published September 8, 2019, by leading climate scientists Wolfgang Knorr and Will Steffen. 

Fact Checking the Climate Crisis: Franzen vs. Facebook on False News

Last year, the writer Jonathan Franzen, not known for mincing his words, took up an opportunity offered by the New Yorker to bring his very own perspective to the debate about the impending climate crisis. The headline read: What If We Stopped Pretending? The climate apocalypse is coming. To prepare for it, we need to admit that we can’t prevent it.

You would think that this was just another opinion piece on the climate catastrophe, this time by a writer from whom you would not expect new insights about the climate system, but maybe some other truths related to the general human predicament. If you happened to be a social media user, however, you might be in for some surprise. On February 15th, the moderators of the Facebook group Positive Deep Adaptation received a “partly false information” warning about Franzen’s New Yorker article having been posted in their group. The warning explicitly referred to an article by the fact checking site Climate Feedback (see image 1). Following considerable political pressure, fact checkers are now routinely used by social media sites to prevent the spread of “false news”. Sanctions for repeat offenders include reducing visibility for the group or site, or removing the ability to earn income.

This gives Climate Feedback’s verdict considerable weight. In this article, we will review the fact checking exercise itself, in order to see if the matter has been handled with the necessary care and level of responsibility. According to their web site Climate Feedback is a worldwide network of scientists sorting fact from fiction in climate change media coverage. As senior climate scientists, our goal is to help readers know which news to trust.

Fact checking the fact checkers

The first thing we noticed was that from the headline and the information below it, it was not possible to tell the exact claim that was being assessed. While the headline read “2°C is not known to be a ‘point of no return’, as Jonathan Franzen claims”, the actual claim by Franzen stated further down was “The consensus among scientists and policy-makers is that we’ll pass this point of no return if the global mean temperature rises by more than two degrees Celsius.” What was left out is some text that in the original article follows immediately after and is therefore an integral part of the claim made by Franzen: “(maybe a little more, but also maybe a little less)”. The verdict: incorrect.

There is an important distinction here: is the claim being reviewed that there is a consensus – which Climate Feedback easily refute because none of the scientist reviewers seems to subscribe to this supposed consensus – or is it rather about the existence of a supposed “point of no return”? In the following, we will discuss both possibilities.

Contrary to the claim by Climate Feedback, and the entire point made by the last reviewer, Marcus Fontela, there is indeed a scientific basis for Franzen’s article, even though he vastly overrates the degree of consensus or the level of scientific understanding of such a hypothesis.

All scientist reviewers – except for one who did not provide references at all – referred to an article led by one of us: Steffen and co-workers (2018) Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene1. It appears that the reviewers correctly identified the source of Franzen’s “point of no return”. The article in question hypothesizes the existence of mutually reinforcing tipping points, or positive feedback mechanisms, in the earth’s climate system. It does not provide definite proof of the existence of such a “tipping cascade”, nor does it say they will all suddenly happen when 2°C of warming is reached, but rather sketches out a plausible scenario. It also provides estimates for the degree of warming required for tipping to be triggered. “Tipping” here means irreversible changes that a return to a lower degree of warming will not be able to stop – or “point of no return”. According to our understanding, the following tipping elements might be affected at 2°C of warming:

1. West Antarctic Ice Sheet – likely tipped (i.e. irreversibly on the pathway to eventual collapse)2
2. Coral reefs – likely tipped (wide-spread destruction from heat stress and ocean acidification)
3. Arctic sea ice cover – likely tipped (irreversible situation arises from increasing heat provided by the darker ocean surface as summer ice disappears)4
4. Amazon rainforest - likely tipped taking into account current rates of human deforestation (i.e. the loss of forest itself decreases regional precipitation rates, thus increasing the overall reduction in rainfall, further influenced by a weakening AMOC – see next point)5,6
5. Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC, the ocean current that brings warm waters to western Europe) – probably not tipped, but significantly weakened7
6. Permafrost carbon stores – probably not tipped, but significant carbon emissions.3

The Special Report on 1.5°C Warming3 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) also backs up Franzen’s claim – to some degree. The IPCC assessed the probability of “large-scale singular events” at 2°C of warming and gave a rating of "moderate to high" (Summary for Policymakers, Figure 2). And a recent commentary in the journal Nature by Tim Lenton and co-workers8 shows evidence that some of those tipping elements may have already been activated.

Another point of potential confusion is that the reviewers do not provide a clear definition of what they believe was meant by “point of no return”. They only suggest that Franzen was talking about a sharp boundary at 2°C warming, for example Patrick Brown: “[...] There was never a scientific consensus that 2.0°C represented some well-defined bright line where impacts suddenly became much worse or feedbacks suddenly became completely self-perpetuating.” Franzen does indeed talk about one point being crossed, but it is not clear if he means a sharp and clearly defined boundary, or rather that somewhere around 2°C a tipping cascade will be triggered. And if a tipping cascade exists, then it will be triggered at a single point, so by definition there would have to be a clearly defined point of transition. It is only questionable if it could be characterised simply by degrees of warming. We must also note that Brown’s 2.0°C “bright line” is a rhetorical ploy designed to ridicule the author’s scientific understanding, where Franzen in fact concedes that his “point” may not be reached at exactly 2°C.

A charge repeated by several reviewers is that Franzen does not understand how climate models work. In fact, Amber Kerr and Charles Koven seem to base their criticism entirely on modelling results. This must be a clear misunderstanding: neither does the New Yorker article refer anywhere to computer modelling, nor has it ever been claimed that it was possible to reliably model tipping cascades. Instead, it is the reviewers who display a remarkable lack of apprehension for the limitations of modelling. For example when Amber Kerr writes: “He says that ‘As a non-scientist, I do my own kind of modelling,’ but he seems to be unaware that scientists have already carried out many qualitative and quantitative climate risk assessments, using policy changes and human behavior as variables.” But even the supporters of such models stress their limitations, while others argue that they are entirely unsuitable for the job. 

The most serious criticism brought forwards by the reviewers is that of Franzen’s fatalism, when he claims “that additional warming over 2°C doesn’t matter” (Amber Kerr). This is a criticism we share. We note, however, that Franzen's apparent misinterpretation of the science is based on a gross overstatement of scientific certainty, which is interesting given the reviewers’ own faith in modelling results. As climate scientists having worked with and developed computer models we rather share Franzen’s pessimism about what models can achieve. For very similar reasons, other scientists who have worked specifically on the possibility of catastrophic climate change have based their conclusions mostly on evidence from past climates, using only minimal modelling9.

The most balanced and objective review, in our opinion, is the one by Alexis Berg, whose main point is the speculative nature of the tipping cascade scenario. He is also more honest and cautious when referring to modeling (italics included by the authors): “Climate model simulations, for instance, which do include some of these feedbacks, do not suggest runaway climate change beyond 2°C.” It is true that the article by Steffen and co-workers is “intended to highlight [...] the high side of the risk distribution”. Franzen seems indeed to have ignored that he has based his whole essay on a hypothesis that was just that – a hypothesis and a warning of what could happen if we continue on the current path.

One more important question that the reviewers, and possibly Climate Feedback in general, should address is whether statements that are inherently about the future can even be fact checked. It is true that the review mostly talks about our current understanding of the climate system. But the event this refers to is in the future. We have therefore no way of empirically either proving or refuting the hypothesis of a discontinuity in the climate system. Hence the repeated reference of the reviewers to model results. What they don’t seem to realise, however, is that models are themselves nothing else than codified hypotheses.

Our recommendation

We believe that this New Yorker article – classified as a “cultural commentary” – should never have been fact checked in the first place. Other authors should of course be free to criticise it, as they have done repeatedly. But at the very least Climate Feedbacks should have clearly stated that the fact checking exercise does not concern the possibility of a tipping cascade being triggered – which can be neither proven nor refuted – but only the level of scientific consensus. For such cases, Climate Feedbacks’ methods provide for a set of well-defined categories that should be stated in the details section of the overall verdict:

Overstates scientific confidence: Presents a conclusion as conclusive while the hypothesis is still being investigated and there remains genuine scientific uncertainty about it.

We would have agreed with such a verdict. Instead, the details provided characterise Franzen’s article as “Misleading: While positive feedbacks exist that amplify temperature changes, scientists have not identified a ‘point of no return’ at 2°C.” 

This overall verdict is itself incorrect, or at least seriously misleading. Scientists have indeed identified the likelihood of such a point of no return, even though it is unlikely the point exists at a sharply defined temperature threshold. Identification does not imply there to be a definite, or even a strong scientific proof. And the overall presentation of the verdict is itself misleading for several reasons: it blatantly omits the final part of the sentence being criticised where the author concedes that he does not believe in a definite threshold value, the rhetorical use of “2.0°C”, the reference to climate models and the claim the author does not understand them, while creating the impression the reviewers don’t understand them either, and the lack of understanding that it is not possible to fact check assertions about the future.

In fact, if one is to “fact check” statements about the future, then the criterion for judgment should be whether there is enough credible evidence – be it from paleo studies, observational evidence, modelling results or, more appropriately, a synthesis of all such types of information – to make a well-reasoned case that the statement represents a plausible future. In other words, when dealing with future risks and events in general, the emphasis should be on whether or not the statement presents a plausible risk assessment rather than a “scientific fact”.

The elephant in the room

What most scientists commenting on his piece did not seem to have noticed is the value of Franzen’s article in naming the elephant in the room: that while emissions keep on rising inexorably, no political action even remotely strong enough to address the problem can be seen anywhere on the horizon. Let us listen to his words here:

As a non-scientist, I do my own kind of modelling. I run various future scenarios through my brain, apply the constraints of human psychology and political reality, take note of the relentless rise in global energy consumption [...], and count the scenarios in which collective action averts catastrophe. [...]

Vast sums of government money must be spent without wasting it and without lining the wrong pockets. Here it’s useful to recall the Kafkaesque joke of the European Union’s biofuel mandate, which served to accelerate the deforestation of Indonesia for palm-oil plantations, and the American subsidy of ethanol fuel, which turned out to benefit no one but corn farmers.

Anyone with even the faintest inkling of today’s political reality will agree that it is irrelevant whether we can still prevent major disruptions of the climate system in theory10, when the heads of state of the largest economy and of the country home to the largest tract of rainforest are outspoken climate change deniers. Needless to say, the so-called integrated assessment models used by the IPCC to run various scenarios contain no concept whatsoever of politics.

Fact checking and difficult truths

Our own view of the situation is somewhat different from Fanzen’s – it does not matter at precisely which level of warming tipping points will be reached, but it does matter how much planetary heating we will generate. As long as there is enough carbon11 contained in fossil-fuel reserves to triple even the current already high amounts of atmospheric CO2, and with no mechanism in sight that could guarantee us an end to fossil-fuel extraction, sooner or later the degree of global heating will reach a critical threshold that leads to major disruptions to human society. The question of whether it is already too late is not one that depends so much on the climate system, but on the ability of human society to rapidly change course. Most scientists, policy makers and even activists seem to tend towards optimism. Franzen disagrees, and we believe scientists should at least listen. 

Difficult truths are always hard to deal with, especially when they concern one’s own and all of humanity’s survival. Even if there was a sliver of truth in Franzen’s message, it would be a cause for great concern and anxiety. Since no scientist so far has said what Franzen does here, that it might not only be time to panic, but already too late, the predictable reaction of professional climate researchers has been almost universally negative. Someone known for his provocative writing style was treading on their turf!

We believe that fact checking is not a helpful approach to improve the debate about the climate crisis. It is not helpful when we need to confront a difficult truth that many, including scientists, find difficult to accept. It is also not helpful, because it supports a mistaken view of the sciences as being foremost about hard facts, and not about interpretation, debate, truth seeking and philosophical attitudes. And even more importantly – as George Marshall has amply demonstrated in his book “Don’t Even Talk about It” – opinions in the climate debate are very rarely swayed by facts. But users of social media have the right to know the position of the scientific community with respect to assertions made on matters of climate science. A much more helpful approach would be to offer this view in the form of reviews, critiques or other forms of essay, as it is done traditionally in the print media. Rather than being sent warnings with a threat of sanctions for repeat-offenders, publishers on social media could be required in certain cases to provide a suitable link so that the reader is helped to form his own opinion. In the case of the Franzen article, a simple disclaimer that his view of the climate system is seen as a low-probability but plausible scenario would surely have been appreciated. The climate crisis requires us to build bridges and not to exclude certain groups from the debate. 

Publisher's notes: 

On February 20th 2020 the "false news" warning is no longer showing on the admin panel of Positive Deep Adaptation facebook group. We will send this article to Facebook, Climate Feedback and the New Yorker for information and advice. 

An interview with the co-author of this article, climate scientist Dr Wolfgang Knorr, goes in to more detail about how climate scientists might often mislead audiences through typical modes of communication. An article by IFLAS founder explores the extent to which assumptions about social psychology underpin the motivations and arguments of scientists and activists to criticise people for publically considering the implications of worst case scenarios. 

Co-author of this article, climate scientist Dr Will Steffen recently called for more research, dialogue and action on the possibilities of societal breakdown or collapse due to climate impacts. 

Last year IFLAS released a compendium of recent research that indicates the worst case scenarios for societal disruption from climate change are now increasingly likely. This was produced by Professor Jem Bendell, the initiator of the deep adaptation framework to climate change response. To discuss the issues arising from this article and issue, consider the Narratives and Messaging group on the Deep Adaptation Forum.

References
1 Steffen, W., J. Rockström, K. Richardson, T. M. Lenton, C. Folke, D. Liverman, C. P. Summerhayes, A. D. Barnosky, S. E. Cornell, and M. Crucifix (2018), Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(33), 8252-8259. (link)
2 IPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate (IPCC, 2019). (link)
3 IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C (IPCC, 2018). (link)
4 Drijfhout, S., S. Bathiany, C. Beaulieu, V. Brovkin, M. Claussen, C. Huntingford, M. Scheffer, G. Sgubin, and D. Swingedouw (2015), Catalogue of abrupt shifts in Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change climate models, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(43), E5777-E5786. (link)
5Lovejoy, T. E. A., and C. Nobre (2018), Amazon tipping point, Science Advances, 4(2), eaat2340. (link)
6 Brayshaw, D. J., T. Woollings, and M. Vellinga (2009), Tropical and extratropical responses of the North Atlantic atmospheric circulation to a sustained weakening of the MOC, J. Clim., 22(11), 3146-3155. (link)
7 Caesar, L., S. Rahmstorf, A. Robinson, G. Feulner, and V. Saba (2018), Observed fingerprint of a weakening Atlantic Ocean overturning circulation, Nature, 556(7700), 191-196. (link)
8 Lenton, T. M., J. Rockström, O. Gaffney, S. Rahmstorf, K. Richardson, W. Steffen, and H. J. Schellnhuber (2019), Climate tipping points—too risky to bet against, Nature, 575, 592-595. (link)
9 Hansen, J., M. Sato, G. Russell, and P. Kharecha (2013), Climate sensitivity, sea level and atmospheric carbon dioxide, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, 371, 20120294. (link)
10 Anderson, K. (2015). Duality in climate science. Nature Geoscience, 8, 898-900. (link)
11 Global Energy Assessment (2012), International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Laxenburg, Austria. (link)

What If We Stopped Pretending?

What If We Stopped Pretending? The climate apocalypse is coming. To prepare for it, we need to admit that we can’t prevent it. Jonathan Franzen, New Yorker. September 8, 2019.

"There is infinite hope,” Kafka tells us, “only not for us.” This is a fittingly mystical epigram from a writer whose characters strive for ostensibly reachable goals and, tragically or amusingly, never manage to get any closer to them. But it seems to me, in our rapidly darkening world, that the converse of Kafka’s quip is equally true: There is no hope, except for us.

I’m talking, of course, about climate change. The struggle to rein in global carbon emissions and keep the planet from melting down has the feel of Kafka’s fiction. The goal has been clear for thirty years, and despite earnest efforts we’ve made essentially no progress toward reaching it. Today, the scientific evidence verges on irrefutable. If you’re younger than sixty, you have a good chance of witnessing the radical destabilization of life on earth—massive crop failures, apocalyptic fires, imploding economies, epic flooding, hundreds of millions of refugees fleeing regions made uninhabitable by extreme heat or permanent drought. If you’re under thirty, you’re all but guaranteed to witness it.

If you care about the planet, and about the people and animals who live on it, there are two ways to think about this. You can keep on hoping that catastrophe is preventable, and feel ever more frustrated or enraged by the world’s inaction. Or you can accept that disaster is coming, and begin to rethink what it means to have hope.

Even at this late date, expressions of unrealistic hope continue to abound. Hardly a day seems to pass without my reading that it’s time to “roll up our sleeves” and “save the planet”; that the problem of climate change can be “solved” if we summon the collective will. Although this message was probably still true in 1988, when the science became fully clear, we’ve emitted as much atmospheric carbon in the past thirty years as we did in the previous two centuries of industrialization. The facts have changed, but somehow the message stays the same.

Psychologically, this denial makes sense. Despite the outrageous fact that I’ll soon be dead forever, I live in the present, not the future. Given a choice between an alarming abstraction (death) and the reassuring evidence of my senses (breakfast!), my mind prefers to focus on the latter. The planet, too, is still marvelously intact, still basically normal—seasons changing, another election year coming, new comedies on Netflix—and its impending collapse is even harder to wrap my mind around than death. Other kinds of apocalypse, whether religious or thermonuclear or asteroidal, at least have the binary neatness of dying: one moment the world is there, the next moment it’s gone forever. Climate apocalypse, by contrast, is messy. It will take the form of increasingly severe crises compounding chaotically until civilization begins to fray. Things will get very bad, but maybe not too soon, and maybe not for everyone. Maybe not for me.

Some of the denial, however, is more willful. The evil of the Republican Party’s position on climate science is well known, but denial is entrenched in progressive politics, too, or at least in its rhetoric. The Green New Deal, the blueprint for some of the most substantial proposals put forth on the issue, is still framed as our last chance to avert catastrophe and save the planet, by way of gargantuan renewable-energy projects. Many of the groups that support those proposals deploy the language of “stopping” climate change, or imply that there’s still time to prevent it. Unlike the political right, the left prides itself on listening to climate scientists, who do indeed allow that catastrophe is theoretically avertable. But not everyone seems to be listening carefully. The stress falls on the word theoretically.

Our atmosphere and oceans can absorb only so much heat before climate change, intensified by various feedback loops, spins completely out of control. The consensus among scientists and policy-makers is that we’ll pass this point of no return if the global mean temperature rises by more than two degrees Celsius (maybe a little more, but also maybe a little less). The I.P.C.C.—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—tells us that, to limit the rise to less than two degrees, we not only need to reverse the trend of the past three decades. We need to approach zero net emissions, globally, in the next three decades.

This is, to say the least, a tall order. It also assumes that you trust the I.P.C.C.’s calculations. New research, described last month in Scientific American, demonstrates that climate scientists, far from exaggerating the threat of climate change, have underestimated its pace and severity. To project the rise in the global mean temperature, scientists rely on complicated atmospheric modelling. They take a host of variables and run them through supercomputers to generate, say, ten thousand different simulations for the coming century, in order to make a “best” prediction of the rise in temperature. When a scientist predicts a rise of two degrees Celsius, she’s merely naming a number about which she’s very confident: the rise will be at least two degrees. The rise might, in fact, be far higher.

As a non-scientist, I do my own kind of modelling. I run various future scenarios through my brain, apply the constraints of human psychology and political reality, take note of the relentless rise in global energy consumption (thus far, the carbon savings provided by renewable energy have been more than offset by consumer demand), and count the scenarios in which collective action averts catastrophe. The scenarios, which I draw from the prescriptions of policy-makers and activists, share certain necessary conditions.

The first condition is that every one of the world’s major polluting countries institute draconian conservation measures, shut down much of its energy and transportation infrastructure, and completely retool its economy. According to a recent paper in Nature, the carbon emissions from existing global infrastructure, if operated through its normal lifetime, will exceed our entire emissions “allowance”—the further gigatons of carbon that can be released without crossing the threshold of catastrophe. (This estimate does not include the thousands of new energy and transportation projects already planned or under construction.) To stay within that allowance, a top-down intervention needs to happen not only in every country but throughout every country. Making New York City a green utopia will not avail if Texans keep pumping oil and driving pickup trucks.

The actions taken by these countries must also be the right ones. Vast sums of government money must be spent without wasting it and without lining the wrong pockets. Here it’s useful to recall the Kafkaesque joke of the European Union’s biofuel mandate, which served to accelerate the deforestation of Indonesia for palm-oil plantations, and the American subsidy of ethanol fuel, which turned out to benefit no one but corn farmers.

Finally, overwhelming numbers of human beings, including millions of government-hating Americans, need to accept high taxes and severe curtailment of their familiar life styles without revolting. They must accept the reality of climate change and have faith in the extreme measures taken to combat it. They can’t dismiss news they dislike as fake. They have to set aside nationalism and class and racial resentments. They have to make sacrifices for distant threatened nations and distant future generations. They have to be permanently terrified by hotter summers and more frequent natural disasters, rather than just getting used to them. Every day, instead of thinking about breakfast, they have to think about death.

Call me a pessimist or call me a humanist, but I don’t see human nature fundamentally changing anytime soon. I can run ten thousand scenarios through my model, and in not one of them do I see the two-degree target being met.

To judge from recent opinion polls, which show that a majority of Americans (many of them Republican) are pessimistic about the planet’s future, and from the success of a book like David Wallace-Wells’s harrowing “The Uninhabitable Earth,” which was released this year, I’m not alone in having reached this conclusion. But there continues to be a reluctance to broadcast it. Some climate activists argue that if we publicly admit that the problem can’t be solved, it will discourage people from taking any ameliorative action at all. This seems to me not only a patronizing calculation but an ineffectual one, given how little progress we have to show for it to date. The activists who make it remind me of the religious leaders who fear that, without the promise of eternal salvation, people won’t bother to behave well. In my experience, nonbelievers are no less loving of their neighbors than believers. And so I wonder what might happen if, instead of denying reality, we told ourselves the truth.

First of all, even if we can no longer hope to be saved from two degrees of warming, there’s still a strong practical and ethical case for reducing carbon emissions. In the long run, it probably makes no difference how badly we overshoot two degrees; once the point of no return is passed, the world will become self-transforming. In the shorter term, however, half measures are better than no measures. Halfway cutting our emissions would make the immediate effects of warming somewhat less severe, and it would somewhat postpone the point of no return. The most terrifying thing about climate change is the speed at which it’s advancing, the almost monthly shattering of temperature records. If collective action resulted in just one fewer devastating hurricane, just a few extra years of relative stability, it would be a goal worth pursuing.

In fact, it would be worth pursuing even if it had no effect at all. To fail to conserve a finite resource when conservation measures are available, to needlessly add carbon to the atmosphere when we know very well what carbon is doing to it, is simply wrong. Although the actions of one individual have zero effect on the climate, this doesn’t mean that they’re meaningless. Each of us has an ethical choice to make. During the Protestant Reformation, when “end times” was merely an idea, not the horribly concrete thing it is today, a key doctrinal question was whether you should perform good works because it will get you into Heaven, or whether you should perform them simply because they’re good—because, while Heaven is a question mark, you know that this world would be better if everyone performed them. I can respect the planet, and care about the people with whom I share it, without believing that it will save me.

More than that, a false hope of salvation can be actively harmful. If you persist in believing that catastrophe can be averted, you commit yourself to tackling a problem so immense that it needs to be everyone’s overriding priority forever. One result, weirdly, is a kind of complacency: by voting for green candidates, riding a bicycle to work, avoiding air travel, you might feel that you’ve done everything you can for the only thing worth doing. Whereas, if you accept the reality that the planet will soon overheat to the point of threatening civilization, there’s a whole lot more you should be doing.

Our resources aren’t infinite. Even if we invest much of them in a longest-shot gamble, reducing carbon emissions in the hope that it will save us, it’s unwise to invest all of them. Every billion dollars spent on high-speed trains, which may or may not be suitable for North America, is a billion not banked for disaster preparedness, reparations to inundated countries, or future humanitarian relief. Every renewable-energy mega-project that destroys a living ecosystem—the “green” energy development now occurring in Kenya’s national parks, the giant hydroelectric projects in Brazil, the construction of solar farms in open spaces, rather than in settled areas—erodes the resilience of a natural world already fighting for its life. Soil and water depletion, overuse of pesticides, the devastation of world fisheries—collective will is needed for these problems, too, and, unlike the problem of carbon, they’re within our power to solve. As a bonus, many low-tech conservation actions (restoring forests, preserving grasslands, eating less meat) can reduce our carbon footprint as effectively as massive industrial changes.

All-out war on climate change made sense only as long as it was winnable. Once you accept that we’ve lost it, other kinds of action take on greater meaning. Preparing for fires and floods and refugees is a directly pertinent example. But the impending catastrophe heightens the urgency of almost any world-improving action. In times of increasing chaos, people seek protection in tribalism and armed force, rather than in the rule of law, and our best defense against this kind of dystopia is to maintain functioning democracies, functioning legal systems, functioning communities. In this respect, any movement toward a more just and civil society can now be considered a meaningful climate action. Securing fair elections is a climate action. Combating extreme wealth inequality is a climate action. Shutting down the hate machines on social media is a climate action. Instituting humane immigration policy, advocating for racial and gender equality, promoting respect for laws and their enforcement, supporting a free and independent press, ridding the country of assault weapons—these are all meaningful climate actions. To survive rising temperatures, every system, whether of the natural world or of the human world, will need to be as strong and healthy as we can make it.

And then there’s the matter of hope. If your hope for the future depends on a wildly optimistic scenario, what will you do ten years from now, when the scenario becomes unworkable even in theory? Give up on the planet entirely? To borrow from the advice of financial planners, I might suggest a more balanced portfolio of hopes, some of them longer-term, most of them shorter. It’s fine to struggle against the constraints of human nature, hoping to mitigate the worst of what’s to come, but it’s just as important to fight smaller, more local battles that you have some realistic hope of winning. Keep doing the right thing for the planet, yes, but also keep trying to save what you love specifically—a community, an institution, a wild place, a species that’s in trouble—and take heart in your small successes. Any good thing you do now is arguably a hedge against the hotter future, but the really meaningful thing is that it’s good today. As long as you have something to love, you have something to hope for.

In Santa Cruz, where I live, there’s an organization called the Homeless Garden Project. On a small working farm at the west end of town, it offers employment, training, support, and a sense of community to members of the city’s homeless population. It can’t “solve” the problem of homelessness, but it’s been changing lives, one at a time, for nearly thirty years. Supporting itself in part by selling organic produce, it contributes more broadly to a revolution in how we think about people in need, the land we depend on, and the natural world around us. In the summer, as a member of its C.S.A. program, I enjoy its kale and strawberries, and in the fall, because the soil is alive and uncontaminated, small migratory birds find sustenance in its furrows.

There may come a time, sooner than any of us likes to think, when the systems of industrial agriculture and global trade break down and homeless people outnumber people with homes. At that point, traditional local farming and strong communities will no longer just be liberal buzzwords. Kindness to neighbors and respect for the land—nurturing healthy soil, wisely managing water, caring for pollinators—will be essential in a crisis and in whatever society survives it. A project like the Homeless Garden offers me the hope that the future, while undoubtedly worse than the present, might also, in some ways, be better. Most of all, though, it gives me hope for today.

Climate Links: Sept 2019

World 'gravely' unprepared for effects of climate crisis – report. Damian Carrington, Guardian. Sept. 10, 2019.

Trillions of dollars needed to avoid ‘climate apartheid’ but this is less than cost of inaction

Join the Global Call to #AdaptOurWorld. Global Commission on Adaptation.
Climate change is upon us and its impacts are getting more severe. We must adapt. 

World leaders from the Global Commission on Adaptation are calling on governments, businesses and local community leaders to take urgent action to advance climate adaptation solutions.

ONLY A GREEN NEW DEAL CAN DOUSE THE FIRES OF ECO-FASCISM. Naomi Klein, The Intercept. September 16 2019.


Only a Global Green New Deal Can Save the Planet. And Bernie Sanders has a plan for that. Tom Athanasiou, The Nation. Sept. 17, 2019

But the true genius of Sanders’s Green New Deal—its secret weapon for achieving the massive emissions cuts he promises—has gone unnoticed by mainstream news organizations and even most climate activists. He clearly recognizes that eliminating greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, as some climate activists have demanded, is all but impossible in an economy as enormous and energy intensive as the United States’—at least without paralyzing transportation systems, endangering food supplies, and otherwise triggering a social backlash. But rather than just endorse the 2030 deadline anyway, as some activists insist, or pretend that the science is negotiable, as most politicians do, Sanders has found a credible way around the dilemma. 

... 

What makes the Sanders plan special is that he accepts the hard scientific truth that steep emissions cuts are essential but he makes such cuts feasible by refusing to limit his vision on how to achieve them. Rather, he adds another hard truth: If humanity is to stabilize the global climate system, rich nations must do their fair share by going beyond domestic action and providing support for emissions reductions in poorer countries. Sanders is the first major American political figure to face the reality and scale of this necessity.

The Prospect of an Elizabeth Warren Nomination Should Be Very Worrying. Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs. Sept. 23, 2019.
The differences between Warren and Sanders are critically important…

... Let’s just forget Bernie, a relic of 2016, and all settle on Warren. 

Why, then, does the prospect of a Warren nomination make me deeply worried? What is it that makes me instinctively feel it would be a very bad idea? Why does it feel to me like there’s something so wrong about the “airtight argument” that’s difficult to articulate?  

...  

Personally, I feel that the difference between Sanders and Warren is gigantic, and that it could have substantial consequences for the future of the world. 

... 

But I think I know what I’m fearing. I fear this is going to be Obama all over again. 

...  

Perhaps I would feel less troubled if I really felt like I could trust Elizabeth Warren. 

...  

She has done so many things that make me suspect she won’t follow through on her radical rhetoric, or will shift to the center in a general election, or won’t be willing to fight as hard as necessary.

What If We Stopped Pretending?  Jonathan Franzen, The New Yorker. September 8, 2019.

The climate apocalypse is coming. To prepare for it, we need to admit that we can’t prevent it.

Don’t bet on the UN to fix climate change – it’s failed for 30 years. Marc Hudson, The Conversation. September 20, 2019.

... amid the hype, it’s worth putting this UN summit in context against the history of 30 years of such international meetings. Is it a vain hope for 197 countries to agree on any meaningful climate action at all, especially when it involves so much money and power? 

Scientists knew from the late 1950s that carbon dioxide was building up and that this could be a problem. By the late 1970s, they knew it would be – it was just a question of when. By 1985, at a workshop of scientists in Villach, Austria, the answer became “sooner than we thought”.

Money Is the Oxygen on Which the Fire of Global Warming Burns. Bill McKibben, The New Yorker. Sept. 17, 2019.

What if the banking, asset-management, and insurance industries moved away from fossil fuels?

Amazon Employees Are Walking Out Over the Company's Huge Carbon Footprint. Lauren Kaori Gurley, vice. Sep 9, 2019.

Nearly 1,000 employees have pledged to walk out September 20 to demand the company go to zero emissions by 2030.

What It’s Like Living in One of the Hottest Cities on Earth—Where It May Soon Be Uninhabitable. Aryn Baker, TIME. September 12, 2019.


World 'losing battle against deforestation'. Mark Kinver, BBC. Sept. 12, 2019.


Climate change: Electrical industry's 'dirty secret' boosts warming. Matt McGrath, BBC. Sep. 13, 2019.


WAR ON THE WORLD. Industrialized Militaries Are a Bigger Part of the Climate Emergency Than You Know. Muraza Hussain, The Intercept. Sept. 15, 2019.


Meat is Murder. But you know that already. Mark Bittman, NYT. Sep. 17  2019.

Book review of:
WE ARE THE WEATHER
Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast
By Jonathan Safran Foer




Documentary “Blowout” Follows Climate Cost of Oil Boom from Fracking to Exports. Jerri-Lynn Scofield, nakedcapitalism. Sep. 22, 2019.

Timely reminder that Trump didn’t create the climate crisis – although he’s certainly making it worse. As the RNN touts this interview, “ [t]he new film follows the U.S. oil supply chain, covering health, climate and environmental justice impacts. And it points to the president who was central to creating the current reality: Barack Obama.”

And They Made a Desert: 80 to 90% Drop in Nutrients in Food. Ian Welsh. Sept. 17, 2019.

The Industrial Era has been the Era of Locusts. We think we’re rich, but most of what has been happening is that we’re consuming resources far faster than they can be replaced. Meanwhile, we’re poisoning ourselves and the earth; shattering ecosystems which we do not know how to repair (or even understand), and altering Earth’s climate cycle ... 

This is crazed behaviour. This is the behaviour of children who have no self-control at all. Even when we know what we are doing is destructive, we keep doing it..

The super-optimists are fools. Yes, it is possible we’ll get out of this, but it’s not possible if we keep telling ourselves that the hole we’ve dug is no big deal.

Divining Comedy. Wen Stephenson, The Baffler. Sept. 5, 2019.

Amitav Ghosh’s new novel is set amid climate disaster—yet it steers toward the mythic and the comic

Amitav Ghosh: I must say, when I started writing Gun Island, it did sometimes seem to me that it was unwise to create a challenge of that kind for myself. I can’t say that it cramped me or worried me in any way, but as you know very well, once one starts thinking about this climate stuff, it just permeates everything; you can’t get away from it. It’s just so completely all around you.

...

AG: You see, one of the things which is so problematic about the world, which is again unraveling, is this idea of time as a progression. You know, that time is always taking you toward, as Obama used to say, “the right side of history.” Whereas anyone who looks at the climate stuff knows that, no, that’s the one thing that you can’t say. And so what do you substitute for that? It has to be some sort of cyclical idea of time, and disaster, catastrophe. That’s a part of it, if you like.

...

AG: I think one very important aspect of it would be simply to acknowledge how wrong we’ve been about everything. Just that. That we acknowledge that the dominant ideas and culture of our time have been wrong about everything.

WS: Everything?

AG: Almost everything, I would say.

...

AG: Until just last year, I’d say, 2018. But even now you have prominent Democrats saying this can’t be the main issue. It can be recognized as an issue, but there are bigger issues.

WS: Right. And yet, when one really comes to grips with the climate science, one realizes that to be serious about climate is to be radical.

AG: That’s right.

WS: In fact, even revolutionary. But until very recently, the left has been almost completely absent on climate change. It’s almost as though the implications of climate science are too radical, even for radicals. What do you make of that?

AG: I think it’s very important. It’s absolutely true that the left—and you’re talking about the American left, but I can tell you that in India, the left never even took local environmental questions seriously. Even after the Bhopal tragedy.

WS: But I feel like we have to ask ourselves, do any of us really take climate politics seriously? It’s easy for me to say, so-and-so isn’t serious because they’re not radical enough. But am I radical enough? I mean, our survival is at stake. A rational response would be a truly revolutionary politics, when we consider what is actually happening, and the amount of time we have to deal with it.

...

AG: I must say, I find Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion incredibly invigorating.

WS: And yet they’re only an extension of the kind of activism we’ve already seen. It’s not truly radical. It’s not revolutionary.

AG: Let me just say, I feel a lot of sympathy, especially for the people you wrote about in your book, and these young activists, my heart goes out to them. But you know, the thing that I can’t forget, because of the part of the world that I’m from, and that I think a lot of people involved in this often forget, is that this is not in the hands of the West anymore. This is going to be decided in Asia, and Africa.

WS: Absolutely. Although, if the United States and Europe were to embark on a crash program to decarbonize their economies by 2050, that would have some effect on the trajectory that China and India take.

AG: It would. But look, America’s addiction to fossil fuel energy isn’t just technological. It’s strategic. It’s through energy that America controls global strategy. If renewables could be adopted at scale, the whole strategic calculus of the world would be completely upended.

WS: Again, it’s unthinkable, right? But revolution is very often unthinkable to those in the historical moment in which it occurs. There are people right now who are absolutely certain that there’s nothing to be done, that it’s over, that all is lost, that we’re doomed. But, actually, there’s a lot of uncertainty still. We don’t know the future. We don’t know what is still possible. The human element, the political and social part, is highly uncertain. We actually don’t know.

AG: Absolutely. We don’t know.

WS: And how one responds to that uncertainty is everything.

AG: That’s right. It’s how bad it will be. This is what it’s about