Climate Links - Oct. 2019 #2

‘We really need to wake up quickly’: Al Gore warns of a looming food crisis caused by climate change. Amanda Little, WashPo. Oct. 22, 2019.

Some 40 panelists, most of them farmers and scientists, took the stage to discuss topics from healthy soil to carbon sequestration, but the main event was Gore's slide show, delivered with his characteristic mix of bravado and humility, detailing the impacts of climate change on food systems worldwide. 

"This is in Georgia; a heat wave cooked these apples before they could be harvested," he said, issuing forth rapid-fire examples alongside bone-chilling images and video. "This is the Australia wine region that's going to be untenable. . . . Rice yields in 80 percent of Japan have declined due to the rising temperatures. . . . In nearby Murfreesboro, Tenn., we'll see a quarter decline in soybean yields within the next 30 years." 

Gore spent the better part of 90 minutes detailing the pressures of drought, heat, flooding, superstorms, "rain bombs," invasive insects, fungi and bacterial blight on food producers. "We may be approaching a threshold beyond which the agriculture that we've always known cannot support human civilization as we know it," he declared in a low growl. "That's something we need to avoid." 

Alice Waters, who Gore said catalyzed his interest in food and who had volunteered to cook the vegetarian lunches served to attendees (using local, seasonal and organic ingredients, natch), said the presentation was bittersweet: "I am deeply depressed. But on the other hand, the solution seems so, so unbelievably transformational. . . . We can restore the health of the planet while also restoring the health of people and communities." 

Naomi Starkman, editor-in-chief of ­Civil Eats, which covers news on sustainable agriculture, was similarly fraught: "Gore spoke with such devastating and fierce clarity, connecting the dots between the ways agriculture is implicated in and impacted by the climate crisis. But it also felt like a hopeful moment wherein agriculture, and farmers in particular, are taking a front-and-central place in solving one of the most urgent issues of our time." 

Mark Bittman, the former New York Times food columnist, was more circumspect: "There are ways in which the conversation here isn't quite realistic. Regenerative agriculture is not about increased yield, it's about producing more of the right food in the right ways. ... But kudos to Al Gore for taking it on. There's no more important conversation to have."

Extinction Rebellion and the Birth of a New Climate Politics. David Wallace-Wells, NYMag. Oct. 15, 2019.

Not that long ago, you could count on the world’s Establishment institutions to give you a comforting if mistaken assessment of the risk of climate change. You could choose to see those demanding radical action to take hold of global warming as, by definition, extremists. And you could be reassured by the fact that none of the planet’s most powerful “responsible” parties were really freaking out much about the state of the crisis. 

Somewhat all of a sudden, that is no longer the case. Very much no longer the case. 

... 

One striking feature of these movements is that, unlike even recent bursts of environmental activism, their rhetoric is, with few exceptions, not out of line with the chorus of scientific consensus, which grows increasingly panicked by the day. A report published by the IMF this month summarizes that new consensus this way:  “There is growing agreement between economists and scientists that the tail risks are material and the risk of catastrophic and irreversible disaster is rising, implying potentially infinite costs of unmitigated climate change, including, in the extreme, human extinction.” This is the IMF, for Christ’s sake. 

When alarmist rhetoric and Establishment wisdom have collapsed into each other, what role is there for protest? It may be less about shifting the Overton window and more about simply insisting that those in power operate as though they believe what they say, rather than retreat into an already-familiar climate hypocrisy (declaring a climate emergency and then immediately approving a new oil pipeline, as Justin Trudeau, for instance, has done).

We Broke the World. Roy Scranton. The Baffler. Sept 2019.

Facing the fact of extinction. 

... 

It should be pointed out that neither the IPBES nor mainstream science supports the conclusion that we face near-term human extinction as a result of ecological collapse or global warming. The business-as-usual scenarios established by the IPBES and IPCC predict a hellish and chaotic future that will with high probability destabilize modern human civilization and likely lead to immense human suffering and death. Significant uncertainty surrounds even these scenarios, however, since contemporary scientists don’t have a good idea of what happens on short time scales with shocks to the global ecosystem as powerful as those we have triggered. Observed changes regularly exceed those predicted by current models: for instance, a recent study reported Arctic permafrost melting “exceeding modeled future thaw depths for 2090 under IPCC RCP 4.5,” that is, seventy years earlier than expected. 

The paleoclimate record can show us what happens in general when the global climate and environment undergoes abrupt transformation, which is often mass extinction, but the record lacks the precision to tell us exactly how abrupt. As geologist Marcia Bjornerud writes in her book Timefulness, discussing the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), a period when the earth was up to 8 degrees Celsius warmer than today and which provides the nearest geological analogue to the climate we might eventually expect from global warming: “The sedimentary record of the PETM, with a resolution no better than a few millennia, does not allow us to distinguish between an essentially instantaneous release of carbon from a belching ocean and a longer-term (1,000-year) combustion of coal or peat.” Looking at observed changes in the earth’s geological record gives us only a fuzzy picture of how and how fast the earth’s biosphere and climate undergo rapid transformation. Climatic and geological changes like those which caused the End-Permian extinction, to take another example, including the release of enormous amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, could have taken thousands of years, or they could have happened much more quickly, perhaps over centuries or even decades. The End-Permian saw up to 96 percent of marine life and up to 70 percent of terrestrial life on earth wiped out. It is thus conceivable that devastating the biosphere as we have and dumping as much carbon into the atmosphere as we have could initiate strong enough positive feedbacks to rapidly heat the earth beyond the point where it could sustain human life within a century or two, but the science is not yet telling us that we’re all going to die from climate change in the near term. 

U.S. Military Could Collapse Within 20 Years Due to Climate Change, Report Commissioned By Pentagon Says. Nafeez Ahmed, vice.com. Oct. 24, 2019.

The report says a combination of global starvation, war, disease, drought, and a fragile power grid could have cascading, devastating effects. 

According to a new U.S. Army report, Americans could face a horrifically grim future from climate change involving blackouts, disease, thirst, starvation and war. The study found that the US military itself might also collapse. This could all happen over the next two decades, the report notes. 

The senior US government officials who wrote the report are from several key agencies including the Army, Defense Intelligence Agency, and NASA. The study called on the Pentagon to urgently prepare for the possibility that domestic power, water, and food systems might collapse due to the impacts of climate change as we near mid-century.

...  

The report paints a frightening portrait of a country falling apart over the next 20 years due to the impacts of climate change on “natural systems such as oceans, lakes, rivers, ground water, reefs, and forests.” 

Current infrastructure in the US, the report says, is woefully underprepared: “Most of the critical infrastructures identified by the Department of Homeland Security are not built to withstand these altered conditions.” 

Some 80 percent of US agricultural exports and 78 percent of imports are water-borne. This means that episodes of flooding due to climate change could leave lasting damage to shipping infrastructure, posing “a major threat to US lives and communities, the US economy and global food security,” the report notes. 

At particular risk is the US national power grid, which could shut down due to “the stressors of a changing climate,” especially changing rainfall levels.

... 

The US Army report shows that California’s power outage could be a taste of things to come, laying out a truly dystopian scenario of what would happen if the national power grid was brought down by climate change. One particularly harrowing paragraph lists off the consequences bluntly:

“If the power grid infrastructure were to collapse, the United States would experience significant:

• Loss of perishable foods and medications
• Loss of water and wastewater distribution systems
• Loss of heating/air conditioning and electrical lighting systems
• Loss of computer, telephone, and communications systems (including airline flights, satellite networks and GPS services)
• Loss of public transportation systems
• Loss of fuel distribution systems and fuel pipelines
• Loss of all electrical systems that do not have back-up power”

full report here:
Implications of Climate Change for the U.S. Army. United States Army War College.

Bates: The Real Climate Debate

The Real Climate Debate. Albert Bates. June 30, 2019.


"That lump in your throat you feel listening to someone laying down hard truth in a poetic way is actually the one piece of the human genome most likely to rescue us."


Climate came up only briefly in the first two Democratic debates. In the first, Rachel Maddow asked whether the candidates had a plan to save Miami. In the second, the moderators asked less than half of the candidates to briefly explain their position on the issue and the first of those (Kamala Harris), after her standard climate soundbite, pivoted to North Korea and Russiagate. Biden and Sanders saw it as a green energy issue—we just need more electric cars.

A more serious and determined debate has been going on outside, as a new wave of scientist-engineers surge through international conferences and refereed journals testing theories about how to recover some hope to sustain life aboard our damaged spacecraft before it passes a yet-unlocated threshold beyond which there is no recoverability.

The new tech they are pimping might be categorized generally as geoengineering, but that tends to toss both wizards and prophets into the same bag, so perhaps the tech side should be split between natural solutions and artificial ones. For carbon dioxide removal, the natural ones are afforestation/reforestation, soil rejuvenation, biochar, holistic management, chinampas, and marine permaculture. The artificial ones are BECCS (Biomass Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage), DACCS (Direct Air Carbon Capture and Storage), and enhanced weathering. To delay the inexorable impact, solar radiation management is a separate category from carbon dioxide removal, and includes things like painting cities white to reflect sunlight (which would not even approach balancing the loss of sea ice at the Arctic), spraying reflective particles into the stratosphere or over large ice masses (which has to be continuously repeated, at great expense, or the bottled-up heat returns in a rapid surge), and seeding the oceans with megatons of iron sulfate to stimulate plankton and algae (another perilous treadmill—get off it if only if you want to die)

And apart from that stage, a different discussion is happening amongst what I would call the realists, although others may just call doomers. In an open letter to David Wallace-Wells published in The Ecologist, April 4, 2019, eco-scientists Rupert Read, John Foster, and Jem Bendell chastised the best-selling author of The Uninhabitable Earth for donning what they considered rose-colored glasses.

We are unconvinced by your claim that because we engineered this mess, so we must be able to engineer an escape from it. While that may be a neat journalistic turn of phrase, it is logical nonsense. 

Climate change was not intentionally engineered by humanity. The self-reinforcing feedbacks that are further heating our world show us how the complex living system of Planet Earth is beyond direct human control. So, we have no precedent for humanity intentionally engineering global change. 

We understand you may wish to offer your readers some hope. However, your argument offers a continuing license for the hubris which has led humanity into climate-peril in the first place. 

You point out that since “a decarbonized economy, a perfectly renewable energy system, a reimagined system of agriculture and perhaps even a meatless planet” are in principle possible, we have “all the tools we need” to stop tragedy in its tracks. And yet that would require us, as you also sardonically note, to rebuild the world’s infrastructure entirely in less time than it took New York City to build three new stops on a subway line.

Harsh words. After reading both Wallace-Wells’ Uninhabitable Earth and Bendell’s Deep Adaptation, I feel the critics probably went over the top. They are accusing Wallace-Wells of hanging on to unrealistic hopes while not making adequate preparations for the likelihood that those will prove groundless. I don’t think Wallace-Wells shied away from urging adequate preparations at all. And to hoist Bendell’s petard (whose ideas are not novel despite his overnight celebrity but should really be attributed to Guy McPherson), his advice is to “give up all hope of solutions without giving up on hope itself,” which is giving up on the prospect of adequate solutions, or more precisely, that humans have the genetic capability of accepting them and changing in time. I know, it’s a mind-bender. That’s why these guys get paid so much to philosophize in academia.

Readers of this blog will know that I am of the opposite persuasion. Thanks to what we have discovered about epigenetics, we have not arrived at a predetermined genetic cul-de-sac. We can, to borrow from John Lilly’s sensory-deprivation tank studies, “re-metaprogram the human biocomputer.” Thanks to what we have discovered about memes, temes, ecosystem regeneration camps, and ecovillages (now being installed in China at breathtaking speed), we are not limited by the cultural inertia of human history since Sumer. And thanks to natural climate solutions of the kind I listed above, especially biochar in all its potential applications, we are not constrained by any shortage of technical solutions, without resort to geoengineer quackery. We know precisely the acreage of forests required and the rates of planting and watering we are capable of. We know how to address the ocean feedback mechanism (exsolvation) with biochar and kelp forests. We know how to pull the fossil fuel IV out of our arm and go cold turkey without getting delirium tremens.

What we don’t know, is how to stop the quarreling and get it done. In this, I think Wallace-Wells and his critics agree. So would McKibben (Falter), Diamond (Upheaval), or Jamail (The End of Ice). Our impediments are mainly behavioral, not technical. McKibben’s approach is to take to the streets, where we can see inspiring protests by Greta Thunberg’s School Strike and Extinction Rebellion. I question, though, whether street protest really works or just makes people feel good by agitating their tribal instincts. Diamond says the problem is (putting on my best Strother Martin impersonation) “a failure to communicate,” for which he lays blame to social media and cheap airline flights. Agreed, Facebook global hegemony and the banalization of the commons is making it far worse, but it is hopeful to see Elizabeth Warren and others going after the Googazonbook social media combines and threatening to break them apart. Jamail says the upside of the fixing response is an upwelling of the human spirit. He gives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s New Green Deal as an example. That lump in your throat you feel listening to someone laying down hard truth in a poetic way is actually the one piece of the human genome most likely to rescue us.

In a Truthout essay published last March, Jamail wrote:

Anyone who thinks there is still time to wholly remedy the situation must answer the question: How do we remove all the heat that’s already been absorbed by the oceans? Invigorated activism, as heartening and important as it is, is not going to completely stem these tides. 

Thus, the third level of activism, adaptation, comes into focus. 

Adaptation is new territory. Here is the realm of healing, reparation (spiritual and psychological, among other ways) and collaboration. It is strangely rich with a new brand of fulfillment and unprecedented intimacy with the Earth and one another. It invites us to get to the roots of what went astray that has led us into the sixth mass extinction. Given that with even our own extinction a very real possibility, even if that worst-case scenario is to run its course, there is time left for amends, honorable completions, and the chance to reconnect in to this Earth with the utmost respect, and in the gentlest of ways.

Read, Bendell and Foster conclude their open letter to Wallace-Wells with this piece of advice:

It is not that acknowledging the hard truths which you present so starkly might still enable us to avoid climate disaster. For that it is, as in practice you so clearly demonstrate, now too late. Rather, it is the hope that through accepting the inevitability of such disaster for our present civilization, we may yet find our way to genuinely transformative change, capable of avoiding terminal catastrophe for humanity and the biosphere. 

The sooner we realize that humanity won’t have a Hollywood ending to climate change, the more chance we have to avoid ours becoming a true horror story.

In that, I think we can agree.

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go,
we have begun our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.
― Wendell Berry

Roy Scranton: No Happy Ending

No Happy Ending: On Bill McKibben’s “Falter” and David Wallace-Wells’s “The Uninhabitable Earth”. Roy Scranton, LA Review of Books. June 3, 2019.

MANY YEARS AGO, when I was a college dropout with bad credit, having defaulted on my student loans, I worked briefly as a phone psychic. There was some training involved: how to use the system that routed callers to your home phone, for instance, but also how to keep callers on the line and, even more important, keep them coming back. On some level, of course, one’s success as a psychic depended on one’s supernatural abilities: either you have the gift or you don’t. The business side, however, depended a lot more on telling the right story. Asking open-ended questions and having a sympathetic ear helped, but the key was in reading the tarot spread in such a way that you crafted a compelling narrative of struggle and overcoming. “Basically, you tell them things will be hard,” my trainer instructed me, “then you tell them things will get better.”

I wasn’t a phone psychic long. The people who called had real problems — cancer, family members in prison, abusive relationships, drugs and alcohol — and my simple story of struggle and overcoming seemed not only inadequate but unethical, a comforting sop to make the unbearable bearable, especially given that my goal was to get them hooked on paying several dollars a minute to hear me interpret the relationship between the seven of wands and the Wheel of Fortune. The stories these people were living didn’t match the story I was being paid to tell them, and deceiving them with happy-ending fables seemed wrong. But the narrative insight my psychic trainer offered was important, and came in use a few years later, when I worked as a door-to-door grassroots canvasser for the largest progressive nonprofit fundraising organization in the United States.

The basic tool of the door-to-door canvasser is “the rap.” It’s a concise, punchy narrative that always follows the same five-part formula: introduce yourself, describe the problem, describe the solution, identify the opposition, and solicit engagement. It’s a subtle variation on the narrative my psychic trainer taught me, in that it adds a villain and ends with an appeal to action. I would learn later that it closely resembles classic Ciceronian structure. Best of all, it worked. Not every door, not every time, but reliably over the long haul. If you knocked on 75 doors and talked to 40 people, which was an average night, you could usually get four or five people to contribute, which was enough to make quota.

I turned out to be pretty good at canvassing, regularly beating quota by significant margins, which was a shock to me, since I’d never really thought of myself as a “people person.” I was quickly promoted to field manager, then assistant campaign director, and soon found myself training canvassers, writing raps for new campaigns, and troubleshooting problems in the field. Any time a canvasser seemed to be flailing, the first and best advice was to have them focus on the rap. It was a sturdy and dependable tool, an effective rhetorical framework for presenting any problem as solvable and for convincing people to write checks and sign petitions — not someday, but right now: “We need your help tonight.”

The last campaign I worked on was a WashPIRG summer campaign to stop the Olympic Pipeline Company from building a petroleum pipeline across the Cascade mountains. It was a noble fight against a dastardly villain, and I brought all my working-class rage to bear on the struggle. Who makes a better enemy than oil executives? What starker conflict could there be than the one between rapacious greedheads and sacred wilderness? By June, the campaign was going great: our canvas was expanding, our canvassers were building powerful esprit de corps, and donations were rolling in. Then something terrible happened.

We won.

Or rather, an underground gas pipeline exploded in Bellingham, Washington, and killed three people, two of them 10-year-old boys. That pipeline was owned by the Olympic Pipeline Company, which prudently withdrew the cross-Cascades proposal we’d been fighting. It was something of a crisis, since we weren’t even halfway through the summer campaign: we still had thousands of postcards, flyers, posters, and factsheets, all urging Washingtonians to “Stop the Pipeline.” The decision WashPIRG leadership made was to count this as a victory and go on the offensive. Our campaign shifted from “Stop the Pipeline” to “No New Pipelines.” The trouble came when we designed the new rap, which didn’t talk about the dead boys at all and gave WashPIRG credit for stopping the pipeline.

There can be no doubt that the pressure WashPIRG put on the Olympic Pipeline Company contributed to that company’s sense that it couldn’t go forward in the wake of the explosion. Yet to claim that WashPIRG was primarily responsible dishonored the memory of those dead boys and deceived the people we were asking to support us. What had happened wasn’t a victory, but a tragedy. The problem was, there’s no room in the rap for tragedy. It’s not that kind of story.

There are few periods in my life as dispiriting as were the last weeks of that campaign, when I went out every night and lied in the service of a good cause. I trained canvassers to dissemble and evade, to downplay tragedy in favor of a story with a happy ending, and to unscrupulously prey on the good faith of well-meaning people because we believed that what we were doing was right. My numbers slipped, and my passion evaporated. I couldn’t even depend on the rap.

The slippage turned into a full-blown ethical crisis, which opened my eyes to the power of institutional inertia and to the dangers of finding yourself trapped in the wrong story. It made me question whether any real social change was possible within the constraints of the system we lived in. If the only stories we could tell had to have happy endings, what else were we lying about? And if our fight was based on lies, what the hell were we fighting for?

I left the Fund and spent some time in Mexico, then came back to Washington for the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999. Participating in that protest, an experience at once chastening and sublime, crippled what faith I had left in protest-based social movements. The WTO protestors were adaptable, passionate, and cunning, but divided, incoherent, and critically weakened by a lack of discipline. The Seattle police and the National Guard were slow and reactive, but they also had all the resources, including time. All they had to do to win was to keep us from winning, which turned out to be relatively easy. The next two years I remember as a complicated search for a way forward. In the spring of 2002, I enlisted in the US Army, in large part for the GI Bill and Army College Fund, but also to understand how the world had changed after 9/11, and soon found myself in a new narrative: protecting America from WMDs by bringing democracy to the people of Iraq in what would be, we were promised, a short and easy war.

¤

The stories we tell ourselves matter. As beings whose social existence is structured by symbolic reasoning, we comprehend our lives through collectively-agreed-upon narratives about what is important, what to attend to, what reality itself is and means. These narratives undergird our politics, inform our notions of identity, and give shape to our desires. They tell us what is possible and what is not, what is known and what is inconceivable, what must be true and what cannot be. It is therefore essential that we always keep testing our narratives against reality, and always be willing to edit, revise, or even wholly rewrite them in light of new information.

Indeed, there are moments when changing the stories we live within is the only way to keep going. Today, facing worldwide ecological collapse, we find ourselves in such a moment. Two new books illustrate and embody this challenge: Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? by Bill McKibben and The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warmingby David Wallace-Wells.

The first, Falter, is journalist-turned-activist Bill McKibben’s 15th book. In it, he presents climate change, economic inequality, artificial intelligence, automation, and genetic engineering as threats to human existence and human identity. McKibben sees the “human game” as risking “playing itself out” primarily because of what he calls “leverage,” by which he means the scale of changes humans are causing. For McKibben, the “human game” is “the entirety of our ceaseless activity,” a game which “has no rules and no end,” but goes “well when it creates more dignity for its players, and badly when that dignity diminishes.”

The threats McKibben discusses are real enough, though his discussion of them tends toward shallow recapitulations of trendy think pieces and internet journalism. The bigger problem is that McKibben never bothers to clarify why it makes sense to think of the sum total of human existence on the planet Earth as a “game,” especially one that has no rules and doesn’t end, since the very definition of game is that it is a structured form of play. The idea of a game with neither rules nor boundaries makes no sense. And while thinkers such as John von Neumann, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Roger Caillois, and Johan Huizinga have all used the idea of games to explore what it means to be human, McKibben doesn’t seem to care much about how games actually work. Rather, he seems to want to use the idea of the “human game” as a secular framework for conceptualizing human values.

McKibben has always been a particularly American kind of public intellectual, in the tradition of Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. Indeed, the historian Richard White once described Bill McKibben’s style as a combination of Emerson and Walt Disney, a comparison White made not “glibly or mockingly,” but rather because of Disney’s “great influence on how Americans […] think about nature.” According to White,

McKibben can so readily bring to mind both Emerson and Disney because a common Protestant sensibility unites all of them. For each, a common religiosity pervades the natural world. Humans learn […] that there is a power that made all of them and is greater than all of them. It must be acknowledged and obeyed.

Thus, McKibben’s notion of the “human game” begins to come into focus, as does the problem it means to solve. Climate change poses such profound challenges to the ways that we conceive of human existence that we are compelled to rethink what that existence means. In some sense, this was apparent from McKibben’s first book, The End of Nature, published in 1989. Since then, he has been a leading voice in framing the problems climate change poses, yet his solutions lean always toward the homiletic. The story McKibben knows best is one in which our mission in the wilderness has foundered but can be saved by spiritual renewal. When he turns to face the future, he does so dressed in a faded patchwork of Protestant confessionalism, Disneyfied Romanticism, and faith in human redemption.

Bill McKibben’s worldview is steeped in the spiritual dregs of ’60s hippie optimism. David Wallace-Wells is of another generation; he was seven when Bill McKibben pronounced the “end of nature,” and belongs to one of the first cohorts that grew up knowing it lived in a world transformed by global warming. “I am not an environmentalist,” he writes, “and [I] don’t even think of myself as a nature person.” Indeed, Wallace-Wells asserts that he wouldn’t mind losing “much of what we think of as ‘nature’ […] so long as we could go on living as we have in the world left behind.” The reason this self-described gadget-loving, beef-eating, bitcoin-buying human chauvinist has written a book about climate change is that we can’t.

The Uninhabitable Earth expands on Wallace-Wells’s alarming and controversial 2017 New York magazine article of the same name and takes a close look at the likely effects of climate change over the next several decades. Wallace-Wells begins with an introductory overview that seeks to dismantle what he calls the “comforting delusions” of climate-change complacency: that it is happening slowly, that it is happening far away, that it is primarily about sea level rise, that wealth can defend against it, that we can expect an easy technological fix, or “that there is any analogue to the scale or scope of this threat, in the long span of human history, that might give us confidence in staring it down.” He then spends the next hundred pages or so taking each consequence of global warming in turn, from “Heat Death” to “Dying Oceans” to “Economic Collapse.” These first two sections of the book are the strongest: while occasionally repetitive, sometimes overwritten, and often mind-numbingly abstract (what, for instance, would it mean that 3.7 degrees of warming could cost the world $551 trillion?), Wallace-Wells paints a compelling, comprehensive, solidly researched, and genuinely terrifying picture of our future.

Wallace-Wells also does justice to the limits and obstacles we face in addressing the problem, which he explores in the book’s last third, building a thorough and convincing argument that we moderns, especially and specifically 21st-century Americans, are prodigiously ill-equipped for coping with or even really understanding the global cataclysm we’ve unleashed. As the reader closes in on the final 30 pages, a dizzying narrative suspense takes hold: the problem Wallace-Wells presents is so overwhelming, so comprehensive, so frightening, and so far beyond the grasp of current political institutions that you wonder how the author will confront the abyss toward which the story seems headed. Disappointingly, Wallace-Wells flinches.

The book’s last two chapters are the least persuasive. In the penultimate chapter, “Ethics at the End of the World,” Wallace-Wells engages in a weak argument with several writers he misleadingly lumps together under the pejorative “ecological nihilism.” While the chapter’s title suggests some discussion of the problem of ethics in a world shaped by climate change, perhaps with reference to the work of thinkers such as Dipesh Chakrabarty, Stephen Gardiner, Donna Haraway, Dale Jamieson, Bruno Latour, Samuel Scheffler, Eugene Thacker, or Anna Tsing, Wallace-Wells instead beats up on a straw man. He starts with the fringe scientist Guy McPherson, who makes an easy target: McPherson’s paranoid style, his outrageous confidence in his predictions (such as that climate change will cause human extinction by 2030), his polyamorous homestead, and his goofy mustache all scream “crank.” And yet as Wallace-Wells himself points out, many of McPherson’s fears are legitimate. Even among McPherson’s mistakes, Wallace-Wells writes, “there is enough real science to give rise to real alarm: a good summary of the albedo effect, a convenient assemblage of rigorous readings of the Arctic ice sheets.” McPherson’s biggest bugbear, Arctic methane emissions, remains poorly understood and controversial, but a recent study shows a surge in atmospheric methane strong enough to negate even the most rigorous plans for CO2 reduction outlined in the Paris Agreement, were they to be enacted. More to the point, McPherson’s ethical quietism is a legitimate philosophical position, not one that can be waved away with a sneer, as Wallace-Wells attempts. It’s easy to dismiss McPherson, less so Epictetus, the Buddha, St. Benedict, and Voltaire.

Wallace-Wells seems to have decided that anyone who takes seriously the possibility that climate change has slipped out of our control isn’t worth seriously considering. It’s not a great loss with McPherson, but it is disappointing to see Wallace-Wells treat Paul Kingsnorth, a provocative and original writer, with condescension and misunderstanding. While McPherson believes he can tell the future, Kingsnorth’s pessimism is grounded in the past, founded on “a simple fact which any historian could confirm: human civilisation is an intensely fragile construction […] built on little more than belief,” as he writes in Uncivilization: The Dark Mountain Manifesto. Such a skeptical, historically informed pessimism has substantial force, and deep literary and philosophical roots. It can be argued against, as can McPherson’s quietism, but not the way Wallace-Wells does here, by implying it’s merely a kind of moral cowardice, then dishonestly mislabeling it “ecological nihilism.” Believing that humans are fallible and that the universe has meaning above and beyond human existence is not nihilism; it is rather the opposite.

In his conclusion, Wallace-Wells writes:

The emergent portrait of suffering is, I hope, horrifying. It is also, entirely, elective. If we allow global warming to proceed, and to punish us with all the ferocity we have fed it, it will be because we have chosen that punishment — collectively walking down a path of suicide. If we avert it, it will be because we have chosen to walk a different path, and endure.

Here’s the crux: climate change is our choice, for we have all the tools we need to stop it. The solutions Wallace-Wells offers are familiar ones (carbon tax, investment in green energy and carbon capture, changing the ways we produce and eat food), but he doesn’t spend much time thinking about the practical steps such policies would require. He doesn’t think much about how politics and governance work. He doesn’t look at history to see how humans in crisis have handled such challenges before. He doesn’t even follow through the implications of everything he’s written in the rest of his book. In spite of his own evidence, Wallace-Wells ends on a note of hope, choosing to see climate change as an “invigorating picture” that “flatters our sense of power, and in so doing calls the world […] to action.”

Whereas McKibben’s book is breezy and rambling, Wallace-Wells’s is more tightly constructed, more focused, and relies more substantially on primary scientific research, but ultimately both adhere to the same basic narrative: things are bad, but they can get better if we’re good. Both books convey alarming visions of the near human future, as temperatures and seas rise, crops fail, diseases spread, refugees suffer, fires burn, conflicts erupt, and the oceans die; yet both books emphasize the power of human agency in deciding our collective future, insisting that in spite of such dire prognostications, we have the capacity to avert the worst and bend the course of human history back from the abyss.

In this way, both authors adhere neatly to the genre of the monitory ecological sermon, which found archetypal form in Theodor Geisel’s 1971 story The Lorax: industrial capitalism has wrought total ecological devastation upon the Earth, denuding it of Truffula Trees, brown Bar-ba-loots, Humming Fish, and Swomee Swans, which devastated world is fated to be our grim gray home forever … unless. Unless, that is, we heed the Lorax who speaks for the trees. The future depends upon cultivating the right feelings: “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” Which implies that if you do care, things will get better — a kind of magical thinking to which Americans seem especially susceptible.

Both The Uninhabitable Earth and Falter swerve in their final pages into this “unless,” in equally desperate and unconvincing ways. Wallace-Wells insists that “[i]f humans are responsible for the problem, they must be capable of undoing it,” which assertion is false in two ways. First, I may be responsible for knocking a glass of wine onto the floor, but I cannot simply undo the shattering. George W. Bush was responsible for the American invasion of Iraq, but no executive order could unbomb Baghdad and resurrect all the children he killed. Both ecological thinking and human history teach the same lesson: actions have complex, unforeseeable, and often irrevocable consequences.

Second, Wallace-Wells’s assertion attributes conscious deliberation to an abstract entity — “humanity” — which has shown no evidence of having any such quality. At the global scale, we act not as rational agents making individual decisions, but as a concatenation of competing actors. Even at the level of the individual, we often face limitations when it comes to doing what we think we ought. Simply because someone is responsible for drinking too much, losing their temper, or making a fool of themselves does not mean that they are necessarily capable of doing otherwise, much less of undoing the consequences of their actions.

While Wallace-Wells subscribes to the standard checklist of proposals to fight climate change, he neglects to present a convincing case for how policies such as the Green New Deal, a carbon tax, or massive global investment in direct air capture technology might be enacted and put into practice. Any environmental studies undergrad can tell you what we need to do; the problem is doing it. Wallace-Wells’s personal exhortations that we “choose to feel empowered” and “take responsibility” for climate change ring as hollow as the self-help slogans they so resemble.

McKibben’s “unless” relies less on contemporary language of empowerment than on a mashup of 1960s social activism and 1970s techno-utopianism. He argues that “two new technologies” offer us the chance to save the Bar-ba-loots: “One is the solar panel, and the other is the nonviolent movement.” To support this claim, McKibben first turns to Thomas Friedman–style anecdotes about poor families in Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, and rural Vermont relying on solar panels for home power generation, then descends into a stupefying mix of cheerleading, moral hectoring, and small-is-beautiful nostalgia.

Solar panels, on their own, cannot meet global energy needs, and will not solve the problems caused by CO2 currently in the atmosphere and oceans, the catastrophic collapse of the biosphere, imminent crises in industrial agriculture, and accelerating climate feedbacks. And at this point — after the 2003 protests against the Iraq War, the “largest anti-war rally in history,” which saw millions of people in hundreds of cities across the world protesting the American invasion of Iraq and which utterly failed to stop the war — after the “People’s Climate March” in 2014, the “largest climate change march in history,” which utterly failed to have any noticeable effect on global climate policy — after decades of failed protests against institutional racism, gun violence, sexism, nuclear weapons, abortion, war, environmental degradation, and a raft of other issues — only the deluded and naïve could maintain that nonviolent protest politics is much more than ritualized wishful thinking. In the end, McKibben’s argument falls into the same vague preaching as does Wallace-Wells’s. Human beings are special, McKibben insists, because we have free will: “We’re the only creature who can decide not to do something we’re capable of doing.” Asking hard questions about who that “we” is, how “we” make decisions, how power works, and the limits of human freedom are beyond the reach of both writers, because such questions lie outside the narrative they’re both trapped in.

Unluckily for us, climate change is not a moral fable, a point Wallace-Wells makes but then seems to forget. “There is nothing to learn from global warming,” he writes early on, “because we do not have the time, or the distance, to contemplate its lessons; we are after all not merely telling the story but living it.” And therein lies the problem with both books. The story we’re living is one of failure, catastrophe, suffering, and tragedy: an out-of-control car careening off a dark road. The story Wallace-Wells and McKibben wind up telling, however, is that we’re in control and the skid is manageable, if only we choose to take the wheel. It’s a story I’ve heard before:

Things are hard but they’re gonna get better … Our enemies are strong but we can defeat them … The odds are long but we can do it … The problem is solvable if we have the political will … We will pass through this time of peril and carry on the work of peace … We’ve reached a turning point … The movement is growing … We need your help tonight …

The lag time between carbon emissions and consequent warming means that even if humans stopped emitting CO2 worldwide today, we would still face levels of warming over the next several decades that will not only put colossal political and economic stress on poor and wealthy nations alike, but also have a good chance of initiating runaway climate change, presuming such a tipping point hasn’t already been passed. Climate feedbacks such as permafrost melt, ice collapse, and wildfires are accelerating. The oceans are both dying and rising, like some Lovecraftian sea monster. Absent a Herculean effort devoting trillions of dollars to building direct-air-capture carbon scrubbers, none of this can be changed.

Despite the unconvincing cheer for human empowerment with which he ends his book, however, David Wallace-Wells understands the seriousness of our predicament. And despite his atavistic Protestant optimism, even Bill McKibben can see that the odds are not in our favor. The challenge these two capable, intelligent writers struggle with so powerfully, and which they so disappointingly fail to meet, is a challenge that anyone who thinks seriously about climate change confronts: the danger we face is utterly unlike anything humanity has ever faced before. Their moral fables don’t really fit our situation, but neither does the traditional narrative of apocalypse, nor the story of wartime mobilization, nor the story of innovation and progress, nor narratives of heroic overcoming.

Climate change is bigger than any individual moral choice. It’s bigger than the New Deal, bigger than the Marshall Plan, bigger than World War II, bigger than racism, sexism, inequality, slavery, the Holocaust, the end of nature, the Sixth Extinction, famine, war, and plague all put together, because the chaos it’s bringing is going to supercharge every other problem. Successfully meeting this crisis would require an abrupt, traumatic revolution in global human society; failing to meet it will be even worse. This is the truth we struggle to comprehend in narrative, the reality our stories must make sense of. The all-too-real possibility we must confront — and which David Wallace-Wells and Bill McKibben notably refuse — is that the story we’re living is a tragedy that ends in disaster, no matter what.

Feature Reference Articles #16

Climate change is not a political issue. Tim Watkis, Consciousness of Sheep. Nov. 1, 2018.

One of the biggest threats behind an increasingly likely human extinction is our tendency to compartmentalise (in order to ignore) information. Each one of us does this unconsciously in a process that psychologist Norman Dixon referred to as “trading safety for peace of mind.” According to Dixon, when faced with danger most humans do not respond rationally; following the course of action (or inaction) that is most likely to keep us safe. Rather, we respond emotionally; taking the course of action (or inaction) that distresses us the least. 

In his book Our Own Worst Enemy, Dixon gives a plethora of examples that ultimately led to tragedy. Among these are: 

• The train driver whose engine exploded because he had hammered a steam valve shut because it was too noisy. Ironically, the explosion blew out his ear drums so that loud (or, indeed, any) noise was no longer an issue for him 
• The airline co-pilot who acquiesced in an unauthorised take-off attempt rather than argue with the pilot; leading to the largest ever loss of life in an air disaster 
• The nuclear engineers at Three Mile Island who opted to believe that their instruments were faulty rather than entertain the possibility that the reactor was overheating.

There is a relatively small part of the human population that is able to process information rationally (although, unfortunately, half of them are psychopaths): People like the NASA engineers who warned their managers not to proceed with the launch of the space shuttle Challenger in January 1986. Not, as was the case in that tragedy, that a warning from one or more alert individuals within a particular discipline makes much difference. 

The Challenger disaster was as much the product of politics and economics as it was to do with engineering and chemistry. Managers were under huge pressure from politicians to carry out the launch for PR value. There was also the looming economic threat that the US military (whose payloads made up the bulk of shuttle missions) might develop their own rival system if NASA kept delaying launches. 

In the end, rather than act rationally and delay the launch – with all the emotionally uncomfortable fallout that would have entailed – they found ways to convince themselves that it would be okay to launch. The result, tragically, was that all seven members of the crew died along with any hope of good PR. 

It is in this light that we need to view the recent – more alarming than usual – call for radical change from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The scientists raising the alarm are akin to the NASA engineers warning of the danger of launching space shuttles in sub-zero temperatures. The economists and politicians are like the NASA managers who are under extreme economic and social pressures to avoid saying or doing anything that might emotionally distress themselves or the wider electorate. 

One psychological device commonly employed to begin this process of denial can be found in the headline chosen by the BBC in their coverage of the story: 

“Final call to save the world from ‘climate catastrophe’” (My emphasis) 

In fact, “the world” is doing something akin to what our bodies do when they become infested with an unwanted infection or toxin; it is warming its temperature by a few degrees in order to kill the organism responsible. The world, you see, is in no danger whatsoever. It has been through eons during which temperatures were far higher than we are likely to make them. During those periods it produced stunning natural wonders; insects as big as large dogs, ferns as tall as houses and reptiles the size of trucks. The world can get along fine irrespective of whether humans are present. 

This talk about “saving the world” is merely trading safety for peace of mind so that we do not have to entertain our species’ headlong charge to oblivion in exactly the same way as we individually avoid thinking about the fact of our own mortality. Instead, we fall into another psychological device; assuming that someone else has got our backs. 

The climate scientists themselves do this when they call upon our political leaders to make radical changes to four key areas of our way of life: 

• Energy – shift to entirely zero carbon and carbon-negative energy sources
• Land use – more vegetables, less meat
• Cities – restructuring to prioritise walking and cycling, energy-saving building standards, etc.
• Industry – electrify, cut back on material use, recycle, go digital, etc.

It is at this point that we realise that climate scientists are not up to speed with the emerging energy economics. While a handful of countries in the developed regions of the world have deployed modern renewables in large enough volumes to impact their electricity systems; most of their actual energy consumption has been off-shored to the parts of the world that manufacture the goods they consume. This allows the (trading safety for peace of mind) illusion that these regions are “greener” than is actually the case. The global reality is very different. As energy expert Kurt Cobb explains: 

“I recently asked a group gathered to hear me speak what percentage of the world’s energy is provided by these six renewable sources: solar, wind, geothermal, wave, tidal, and ocean energy.  

“Then came the guesses: To my left, 25 percent; straight ahead, 30 percent; on my right, 20 percent and 15 percent; a pessimist sitting to the far right, 7 percent.  

“The group was astonished when I related the actual figure: 1.5 percent. The figure comes from the Paris-based International Energy Agency, a consortium of 30 countries that monitors energy developments worldwide. The audience that evening had been under the gravely mistaken impression that human society was much further along in its transition to renewable energy. Even the pessimist in the audience was off by more than a factor of four.” 

Worse still, none of the renewable energy generation deployed so far has been used to replace the energy generated from fossil fuels; global energy consumption continues to grow remorselessly, and renewables have merely been added to the mix. The only major energy transition has been the shift from coal to gas-fired power stations. 

The common public/political response to the realisation that we are nowhere near even beginning to wean ourselves off fossil fuels, is to (trading safety for peace of mind) call for governments to redouble their efforts. This, however, depends upon the fallacy that governments are doing anything more than adding hot air and volumes of unworkable policy proposals. The reality is that the only difference between Donald Trump and Angela Merkel when it comes to climate policy is that Trump revels in burning coal while Merkel desperately attempts to convince us that she isn’t doing it. 

As with proposals to totally re-engineer the global energy systems, proposals for the radical reform of cities, industry and land use are beyond us. The fundamental flaw is visible in the way we deploy so-called renewable electricity. Rob Mielcarski summarizes the problem: 

“Renewable energies cannot stand on their own without fossil energy to create, install, and maintain their materials and infrastructure. For example, wind turbines use large quantities of concrete, steel, and copper that cannot be made without fossil energy. Renewables are at best fossil energy extenders. At worst they accelerate economic growth and burn up the remaining fossil energy faster to capture some wind or solar energy with equipment that will wear out in less than 50 years when there will be little or no fossil energy needed to replace the equipment.” 

There is simply no good way in which we can switch to a renewable energy-powered economy without burning so much of the remaining fossil fuels and consuming so many of the remaining resources that we accelerate the very crises we are seeking to prevent. 

When climate scientists and politicians call on us to redouble our efforts – one even called for the kind of mobilization seen in World War Two – they neglect to point out that we have neither the capital, energy nor the resources available both to feed the existing population and to even scratch the surface of the transition to a zero-carbon economy. As Professor of Petroleum and Chemical Engineering, Tad Patzek points out: 

“To compare the WWII industrial effort with the global dislocation necessary to ameliorate some of the effects of climate change is surprisingly naive and proves that the three professors got Ds in their history electives, if they had any. This comparison also neglects to account for the human population that has almost quadrupled between the 1940s and now, and the resource consumption that has increased almost 10-fold. The world today cannot grow its industrial production the way we did during WWII. There is simply not enough of the planet Earth left to be devoured.” 

While it is true that key states were industrialized in 1939 (or 1941), the majority of the world was not. It was only after Europe and Japan emerged from their post-war reconstruction efforts in the early 1950s that the full-blown economic growth of the global economy really took off. As historian Paul Kennedy explains: 

“The accumulated world industrial output between 1953 and 1973 was comparable in volume to that of the entire century and a half which separated 1953 from 1800. The recovery of war-damaged economies, the development of new technologies, the continued shift from agriculture to industry, the harnessing of national resources within ‘planned economies,’ and the spread of industrialization to the Third World all helped to effect this dramatic change. In an even more emphatic way, and for much the same reasons, the volume of world trade also grew spectacularly after 1945…” 

It is no coincidence that this economically magical twenty-year period is also the period when global oil consumption grew exponentially; or that the economic upswing ended when exponential oil production growth ceased. Remarkably, even as this short period of our history recedes into the fog of the past, economists continue to treat the once-and-for-good conditions in those two decades as the “normal” that we are supposed to be trying to get back to. 

There is one, very simple way that we can keep global temperatures from reaching the point where our species goes extinct. We stop burning all fossil fuels immediately. 

If we do so, of course, we will be plunged into a new dark age as all of the life support systems we depend upon would collapse within hours. From the ashes, a much smaller – 1 billion at most – population will be able to restore the kind of renewables-only economy of the Atlantic slave economies in the seventeenth century. 

It is, of course, very emotionally challenging to acknowledge that one way or another, this is the type of economy humans – if they do not become extinct – will have to adopt. Instead, we trade safety for peace of mind by continuing with a way of life that we readily admit to being unsustainable in the vain hope that clever people somewhere else are going to come up with a new energy source that is both carbon-free and capable of providing sufficient net energy not just to power continued economic growth; but to simultaneously repair the damage we have already done to the human habitat. 

Patzek understands the politics of the crisis better than most: 

“Our children have far less access to the luxuries of the global amoeba and to that extent they are more in tune with reality. But they are mostly passive, alienated from the natural environment, and brainwashed by living with smart phones and Facebook. So, by and enlarge, our children don’t vote and don’t try to change what they see coming. 

“My generation, though, consists mostly of the frightened, self-centred cowards who hope that preserving the governing narrative will protect us from the inevitable. Welcome to the overpopulated world with the climate change, increasing international chaos, growing nationalism, xenophobia, racism, fascism and religious intolerance…”

So no, climate change is not a political issue; it is a profoundly psychological one. Until and unless far more of us are prepared to drop our comfort blankets and look our predicament in the face, extinction is our most likely fate. As Mielcarski puts it: 

“When a crisis forces action we will probably blame the wrong actors. Our responses are not likely to be rational or optimal. Expect chaos. 

“A few people have broken through inherited denial. So it is possible. But scaling this to the majority will be a challenge.”

And even if a majority can bring themselves to stop trading safety for peace of mind, the time is running short. The seas are rising faster than anyone thought and the time we have left to act can be counted in months rather than decades. It may be that none of us will survive the storm that is about to break around us.

The Inconvenient Truth of Modern Civilization’s Inevitable Collapse. Collapse of Industrial Civilization.

“My early death by fossil fuel reflects what we are doing to ourselves.”
~ David Buckel 

Today’s global consumption of fossil fuels now stands at roughly five times what it was in the 1950s, and one-and-half times that of the 1980s when the science of global warming had already been confirmed and accepted by governments with the implication that there was an urgent need to act. 

Tomes of scientific studies have been logged in the last several decades documenting the deteriorating biospheric health, yet nothing substantive has been done to curtail it. 

More CO2 has been emitted since the inception of the UN Climate Change Convention in 1992 than in all of human history. CO2 emissions are 55% higher today than in 1990. Despite 20 international conferences on fossil fuel use reduction and an international treaty that entered into force in 1994, man-made greenhouse gases have risen inexorably. 

If it has not dawned on you by now, our economic and political systems are ill-equipped to deal with this existential threat. Existing international agreements are toothless because they have no verification or enforcement and do not require anything remotely close to what is needed to avoid catastrophe. 

The 20 warmest years on record have been in the past 22 years, with the top four in the past four years, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Ice loss from Antarctica has sextupled since the 1970s and Greenland’s pace of ice loss has increased fourfold since 2003. The Arctic ocean has lost 95% of its old ice and total volume of ice in September, the lowest ice month of the year, has declined by 78% between 1979 and 2012. With grim implications for the future, Earth’s air conditioner —the cryosphere— is melting away.  

An article from a few months ago lays bare the reality that throughout the past two hundred years and with recent “alternative” or “renewable” energy sources, humans have only added to the total energy they consume without ever having displaced the old, polluting ones. An alternative energy outlook report by Wood Mackenzie foresees that even in a carbon-constrained future, fossil fuels would still make up 77% of global energy consumption in 2040. The world economy remains hopelessly tethered to fossil fuels. We are kidding ourselves if we think there will be any sort of orderly transition to sustainability with which modern civilization appears to be wholly incompatible. We are, as Nate Hagens says, energy blind. 

Modern civilization has become so intertwined with petroleum-based products that their remnants are now found in our excrement. It seems no living thing can escape microplastics, not even the eggs of remote Arctic birds. 

This should come as no surprise if you look at the scale of the problem. Plastic production has grown from 2 million metric tons in 1950 to roughly 400 million metric tons today (more than 99% of plastics made today are with fossil fuels and only a tiny fraction of it recycled). There are five massive oceanic gyres filled with pelagic plastics, chemical sludge and other human detritus; one of the these gyres, named the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, is three times the size of France and growing exponentially. The health and environmental effects are grim; organized society may not even be around to examine the long-term effects of these persistent synthetic materials: 

“Health problems associated with plastics throughout the lifecycle includes numerous forms of cancers, diabetes, several organ malfunctions, impact on eyes, skin and other sensory organs, birth defects” and many other impacts, said David Azoulay, a report author and managing attorney at the Center for International Environmental Law…” And those are only the human health costs, they do not mention impacts on climate, impacts on fisheries or farmland productivity.” 

Making things more efficient and convenient has its limits, but humans keep trying to beat the consequences of Earth’s dwindling natural resources while ignoring the environmental costs. Jevons paradox be damned! To make matters worse, the fossil fuel industry has employed a well-financed and highly effective global disinformation campaign to confuse and sow doubt in the public mind about the reality of climate change. And to top it all off, we have a leader who reinforces the ignorance of climate change deniers:

It’s a cruel irony that this President’s emergency declaration for building a border wall comes at a time when migration from Latin America is near a 40-year low and the majority of those now seeking asylum are families fleeing climate change-related disasters. This President and the craven politicians who line up behind him are an abomination! 

At a time when compassion, cooperation, and scientific reasoning are needed to deal with the multiple crises we face, politicians are instead conjuring up xenophobia, racism, and conspiracy theories. As inequality grows and the once-stable climate continues to unravel, expect the super-rich to barricade themselves behind heavily fortified mansions while treating climate refugees and the most vulnerable among us with extreme prejudice. A new study shows increasingly severe weather events are fueling the number of ‘food shocks’ around the world and jeopardizing global security: 

These “food shocks” —or, sudden losses to food production— are hitting local communities hard, in addition to impacting the global economy, with long-term implications. “Critically, shock frequency has increased through time on land and sea at a global scale,” the study notes. “Geopolitical and extreme-weather events were the main shock drivers identified, but with considerable differences across sectors.” 

Douglas Theobald in his study at Brandeis University calculated that there is less than a 1 in 102,860 chance that all life did not arise from a common ancestor. In other words, humans are related to all life on Earth and share much of their DNA with other organisms. Despite earning the title of ‘superpredator‘, humans are dependent on intact and functioning ecosystems. 

Our chances for long-term survival are ultimately tied to the health of the planet, yet we are carrying out ecocide on a planetary scale. Being a mere 0.01% of all life on Earth, humans have managed to destroy 50% of wild animals in just the last fifty years and 83% since the dawn of civilization around 3,000 B.C.. Who knows how many plant species have gone extinct: 

Hawaii is losing plant species at the rate of one per year, when it should be roughly one every 10,000 years. “We have a term called ‘plant-blindness’… People simply don’t see them; they view greenery as an indistinguishable mass, rather than as thousands of genetically separate and fragile individuals…” 

The bedrock of our food, clean water and energy is biodiversity, but its loss now rivals the impacts of climate change. Without biodiversity, our food sources, both plants and animals, will succumb to diseases. Microbes and hundreds of different life forms interact to make soils fertile. Without them, soils will be barren and unable to support life. Monocultures can only be held together through artificial means (fossil fuels, inorganic fertilizer and toxic pesticides) and are highly vulnerable to diseases, yet industrial monoculture farming continues to dominate the globe. Most worrisome are the recent studies indicating that biodiversity loss raises the risk of ‘extinction cascades’. Insect numbers, the base of the terrestrial food chain, are in steep decline and starfish, a common keystone species in coastal ecosystems, are facing extinction due to some sort of wasting disease likely caused by climate change: 

“Many of these outbreaks are heat sensitive. In the lab, sea stars got sick sooner and died faster in warmer water… A warming ocean could increase the impact of infectious diseases like this one…We could be watching the extinction of what was a common species just 5 years ago.” 

These disturbing headlines indicate to me that the Sixth Mass Extinction is gathering pace and the real stock market underlying our very existence and survival is crashing before our very eyes!!! 

The human endeavor has grown much too large for the Earth to support; climate change, plastic pollution, and biodiversity loss are just a few of the symptoms of this global ecological overshoot. The people who have studied this problem for years and from every angle have come to the same conclusion — technology simply won’t save us, but that won’t stop humans from experimenting. By far the most effective way to reduce future emissions and resource consumption is to reduce human birth rates, yet the global population is still increasing at about 90 million people per year despite the geographic shift in fertility rates. 

Humans recognized decades ago the threats they are now facing, yet nothing was done due to political inaction and industry malfeasance which continues to this very day. 

The scientists who wrote The Limits to Growth decades ago were expecting our political institutions to take action back in the 1970s, but they were met with ridicule and now we stand at the doorstep of modern civilization’s collapse. 

Political inaction and regulatory capture by the fossil fuel industry appear to be an intractable barriers that have condemned the human race to a hellish future. 

Anyone waiting for some sort of seminal climate change event that is going to galvanize the world’s leaders into action will be tragically disappointed. 

If seeing the world’s coral reefs dying, its glaciers disappearing, permafrost melting, and the steady uptick in extreme weather events does not spur them to action, it is much too late to hope that any one event will ever do so. The time to act would have been before we were seeing all these environmental degradations and tipping points, not afterward. There is no way to put the CO2 genie back in the bottle. A myth that many uninformed people hold is that biospheric health will quickly bounce back after we humans get our act together. Nothing could be further from the truth. Much of the damage we are already seeing is irreversible on human time scales. Positive feedbacks were already occurring at less than 1°C of warming. Many carbon sinks are on the verge of becoming or have already become carbon sources. We are leaving behind a “forever legacy” and humanity is still accelerating towards a hellish future with no realistic way to stop.

Why the Anthropocene is not ‘climate change’ — and why that matters. Julia Adeney Thomas, Asia Global Online. Jan. 10, 2019.

Climate is just one part of the Earth System. If we focus on that alone, we will misunderstand the complexity of the danger posed by unprecedented planetary change.

“Anthropocene” is a widely proposed name for the geological epoch that covers human impact on our planet. But it is not synonymous with “climate change,” nor can it be covered by “environmental problems.” Bigger and more shocking, the Anthropocene encapsulates the evidence that human pressures became so profound around the middle of the 20th century that we blew a planetary gasket. Hello, new Earth System. Hello, Anthropocene. 

The phrase “Earth System” refers to the entirety of our planet’s interacting physical, chemical, biological, and human processes. Enabled by new data-collecting technologies like satellites and ever more powerful computer modeling, Earth System science reframes how we understand our planet. Climate is just one element of this system; if we focus on that alone, we will misunderstand the complexity of the danger. 

The term “environment” helps us understand ourselves as part of ecosystems, but fails to capture the newness of our current situation. We have always lived in the environment; only very recently, just as Asia began its skyrocketing development, did we begin living in the altered Earth System of the Anthropocene. 

The Anthropocene requires a new way of thinking 

The Anthropocene is a multidimensional challenge. Our future is more unpredictable than ever, with new phenomena like Category 5 megastorms, rapid species extinction, and the loss of polar ice. This change is irreversible. NASA says that levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) are higher than they have been at any time in the past 400,000 years — well before our species evolved — causing the atmosphere to warm. 

The climate has certainly changed, but so too have other aspects of the planetary system. Take the lithosphere: 193,000 human-made “inorganic crystalline compounds,” or what you and I might call “rocks,” now vastly outnumber Earth’s ~5000 natural minerals, while 8.3 billion tons of plastics coat the land, water, and our internal organs. Due to modern agribusiness techniques, so much topsoil is washing away that England has only about 60 more harvests left. 

The biosphere is equally altered. Never has the planet been so crowded with human beings. In 1900, there were around 1.5 billion of us; in the 1960s, around 3 billion; today there are upwards of 7.4 billion. Human beings and our domesticated animals comprise an astounding 97% of the total zoomass of terrestrial mammals, meaning that wild creatures make up a miserly 3%. Humans and our companion species occupy considerably more than half of the planet’s habitable land surface. Concerning the hydrosphere, fresh water renews itself at the rate of about 1% a year, but currently 21 out of 37 of the world’s major aquifers are being drawn down faster—in some cases much faster — than they can be replenished. 

The planet’s chemistry has changed too. Warmer oceans interfere with the production of oxygen by phytoplankton, and some scientists predict that with a rise of 6C — which could happen as soon as 2100—this oxygen production could cease. Our production of fixed nitrogen is five times higher than it was 60 years ago; in fact, Earth has never had so much fixed nitrogen in its entire ~4.5-billion-year history. Since World War II, synthetic chemical production has increased more than thirtyfold. Of the more than 80,000 new chemicals, the United States Environmental Protection Agency has tested only about 200 for human health risks. 

Alarming as each factor is on its own, the concept of the Anthropocene brings all these factors and others together. This is the only way that we can understand Earth as a single reverberating system with feedback loops and tipping points that we can’t yet predict. 

The Anthropocene’s interrelated systematicity presents not a problem, but a multidimensional predicament. A problem might be solved, often with a single technological tool produced by experts in a single field, but a predicament presents a challenging condition requiring resources and ideas of many kinds. We don’t solve predicaments; instead, we navigate through them. 

Collaboration among scientists, policymakers, social scientists, humanists, and community leaders is key to contending with the Anthropocene. Technology is important, but the hardest challenges will be about how to alter our political and economic systems. Even the United Nations’ US$24 million Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005) concluded that our current systems are not up to the task: we need “significant changes in policies, institutions and practices that are not currently under way.” 

The danger of the one-dimensional thinking of climate change 

So, are the techno-optimists, who believe most world problems can be solved by innovation, wrong? The answer to this question is that they are not so much wrong as misguided, addressing a narrow issue in the narrowest terms. Most begin by gesturing toward the totality of environmental problems, but end by focusing on climate change alone. Sometimes climate change is further reduced to CO2 emissions to the exclusion of all other greenhouse gases, such as methane. 

A favorite example of techno-optimists like economist Jeffrey Sachs is substituting wind power for fossil fuels. Like others, he speaks in confident tones about “decoupling” economic growth from natural resources, contending that “growth can continue while pressures on key resources (water, air, land, habitats of other species) and pollution are significantly reduced rather than increased,” by means of new technologies and market pricing. In short, we can provide for the growing human population (expected to hit 8 billion in 2023) without destroying the ecosystem, without impoverishing future generations, and without bothering to transform our political and economic systems. The status quo is fine if we tighten a few nuts and bolts. 

Let us look at this techno-optimism from the Anthropocene perspective. 

Most offshore wind turbines require rare earth metals sourced from China, which supplies about 90% of the world’s demand and has a monopoly on some elements. Not only are the mines of China’s primary production site, the southeastern province of Jiangxi, being rapidly depleted, but such mining entails shocking environmental and social costs. According to investigative journalist Liu Hongqiao, “Research has found that producing one ton of rare earth ore (in terms of rare earth oxides) produces 200 cubic meters of acidic wastewater. The production of the rare earths needed to meet China’s demand for wind turbines up to 2050 … will result in the release of 80 million cubic meters of wastewater.” 

Once obtained, this ore must be transported and processed to make turbines. These turbines, once positioned, require maintenance, using more resources. Ultimately, though, they will end up as refuse, more trash on our trash-filled planet. There is nothing dematerialized or carbon-free about wind turbines if we look at the total picture. 

Reducing our problem to climate change, then to CO2, and finally to measuring emissions only at the point of energy production is a dramatic misrepresentation of our dilemma. An Anthropocene perspective is needed to keep the totality of the predicament in view. 

Slowing climate change is crucial but navigating its challenges is only possible if it is understood as one facet of planetary overshoot. The challenges of our altered, unpredictable Earth System cannot be met by technological tinkering within the very systems that pushed it over the edge in the first place. There’s nothing for it but to roll up our sleeves and begin the hard work of transforming our political and economic systems with the aims of decency and resilience.

Climate change denial (the other sort) is alive and well. Consciousness  of Sheep. Jan. 18, 2019.

There is broad agreement that 2018 was the worst year yet for the environment. According to the New York Times “The Story of 2018 Was Climate Change;” while the Washington Post informed us that: “Extreme weather in 2018 was a raging, howling signal of climate change.” Meanwhile on this side of the Atlantic EuroNews warned us that “Europe’s chaotic weather in 2018 is a wake-up call for climate change.” 

Not that any of this made much impression on the world’s climate change denier-in-chief, Mr Trump; who has recently been berated (again) for failing to understand the difference between climate and weather. In response to the wave of winter weather that has descended on the USA this week, Trump decided to troll environmentalists on his Twitter feed: 

“Be careful and try staying in your house. Large parts of the Country are suffering from tremendous amounts of snow and near record setting cold. Amazing how big this system is. Wouldn’t be bad to have a little of that good old fashioned Global Warming right now!”

The tweet was no doubt designed to antagonise Trump’s democrat opponents who are currently engaged in their own version of denial. New Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez swept into the House of Representatives demanding that her Democrat colleagues put tackling climate change front and centre now that they have taken control of the House from the deniers in the Republican Party. This went down like a lead balloon in the office of the new Speaker, Nancy Pelosi; who quickly co-opted Ms Ocasio-Cortez’s support for a microwaved version of the all-talk-but-no-action climate policies adopted in the Obama era. As Anthony Adragna and Zack Colman at Politico note:

“Moderate and establishment Democrats largely prevailed in their first showdown with liberals over the select committee. Whereas protesters, joined by Ocasio-Cortez, stormed Pelosi’s office last November demanding the panel be empowered to issue subpoenas and write legislation, the committee that Democrats will establish Thursday can do neither of those things. It is only authorized to conduct investigations and develop policy recommendations to reduce the effects of climate change. Any legislation would be drafted by standing committees such as Energy and Commerce.”

No sooner had the corporate wing of the Democrat Party succeeded in turning the Select Committee on the Climate Crisis into talking shop (albeit one with a more urgent-sounding name) than Speaker Pelosi and her corporate Democrat followers revealed their true feelings about climate change by dashing off to the airport to fly off on a jolly with the corporate lobbyists down in Puerto Rico. The climate crisis, it would appear, is not quite urgent enough to cause anyone to cancel a flight to a corporate beano… at least, not someone who was booked on a flight. 

The ongoing manifestation of “Al Gore Syndrome” – in which the rich fly around the planet lecturing the rest of us on how we (i.e. not them) have to do something about climate change – is also on display in Davos this week. As Rebecca Ratcliffe at the Guardian reports: 

“David Attenborough might have urged world leaders at Davos to take urgent action on climate change, but it appears no one was listening. As he spoke, experts predicted up to 1,500 individual private jets will fly to and from airfields serving the Swiss ski resort this week.

“Political and business leaders and lobbyists are opting for bigger, more expensive aircrafts, according to analysis by the Air Charter Service, which found the number of private jet flights grew by 11% last year.”

Worse still, an outbreak of penis envy among wealthy delegates has led to a ramping up of the size (and thus the weight and carbon emissions) of private jets similar to the “my yacht is bigger than your yacht” competition that the (largely male) global elite has engaged in for decades. 

The sheer hypocrisy of a wealthy elite whose lifestyles do more to undermine the environment flying off to a luxury sky resort to discuss environmental policy has not been lost on the increasingly strident right wing populist movement that is snowballing across the western states. Michael Bastasch at the right-wing Daily Caller lists the series of climate policy defeats that were inflicted on the neoliberal elites during 2018:

“Despite increasingly apocalyptic warnings from U.N. officials, 2018 has seen a number of high-profile defeats for policies aimed at fighting global warming. Politicians and voters pushed back at attempts to raise energy prices as part of the climate crusade.” 

The list of defeats includes:

• Ontario Premier Doug Ford revoking a carbon tax in June
• Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull failed to pass a carbon reduction bill and was forced to resign in August
• Washington state governor Jay Inslee failed to get a carbon tax adopted during the November elections
• A group of Republicans who do not deny climate change, the House Climate Solutions Caucus, were also voted out in November
• Toward the end of November, French President Emmanuel Macron made his ill-fated attempt to impose a climate levy on diesel fuels; sparking the massive yellow vests protests. 

According to Bastasch, the political fallout in France has persuaded the Pelosi wing of the Democrat Party to tone down their stance on climate change:

“France’s carbon tax revolts sent a clear message to Democratic lawmakers across the Atlantic Ocean. Democrats will take control of the House in 2019 and want to make global warming a central part of their agenda. 

“Democrats and even environmentalists distanced themselves from carbon taxes in the wake of French riots…” 

I leave it to readers to decide which is the more deplorable, the politician who refuses to accept the science or the politician who accepts the science but then behaves as if the science is a hoax. There is, however, clearly a different kind of climate change denial going on here; one that plays dangerously to the narrative of right wing false populists. 

There was a time when I wondered whether it would be different, if only there was someone idolised by the political right who accepted the science and stood up to call for action. Indeed, if only there was such a figure who also had a solid background in the physical sciences. Surely that would have done away with denial; allowing us to have a sensible debate about how to reverse or at least mitigate the growing climate emergency. And then I remembered that there once was such a person… 

On November 8th 1989, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher – the nearest you can get to a secular saint among the political right – gave a speech to the United Nations General Assembly, calling on world leaders to take action on climate change while there was still time: 

“For two centuries, since the Age of the Enlightenment, we assumed that whatever the advance of science, whatever the economic development, whatever the increase in human numbers, the world would go on much the same. That was progress. And that was what we wanted.

“Now we know that this is no longer true. 

“We have become more and more aware of the growing imbalance between our species and other species, between population and resources, between humankind and the natural order of which we are part. 

“In recent years, we have been playing with the conditions of the life we know on the surface of our planet. We have cared too little for our seas, our forests and our land. We have treated the air and the oceans like a dustbin. We have come to realise that man’s activities and numbers threaten to upset the biological balance which we have taken for granted and on which human life depends. 

“We must remember our duty to Nature before it is too late. That duty is constant. It is never completed. It lives on as we breathe. It endures as we eat and sleep, work and rest, as we are born and as we pass away. The duty to Nature will remain long after our own endeavours have brought peace to the Middle East. It will weigh on our shoulders for as long as we wish to dwell on a living and thriving planet, and hand it on to our children and theirs.” 

Thatcher even broached issues surrounding the climate crisis that today’s activists shy away from even thinking, still less mentioning in polite conversation:

“The real dangers arise because climate change is combined with other problems of our age: for instance the population explosion; — the deterioration of soil fertility; — increasing pollution of the sea; — intensive use of fossil fuel; — and destruction of the world’s forests, particularly those in the tropics.”

This outline of the crisis – obvious enough to people three decades ago – could have come out of the mouth of any of today’s climate activists. But coming from one of the most revered neoliberals – and a doctor of chemistry to boot – it should have been followed by a serious, worldwide programme of action. It wasn’t; and for good reason. At the end of the speech, Thatcher threw in the one condition that condemned us:

“We have to recognise the importance of economic growth of a kind that benefits future as well as present generations everywhere. We need it not only to raise living standards but to generate the wealth required to pay for protection of the environment. 

“It would be absurd to adopt polices which would bankrupt the industrial nations, or doom the poorer countries to increasing poverty…”

This was to effectively argue that “we have to destroy the environment in order to save the environment.” World leaders could take whatever action they decided upon… provided that it didn’t interfere with the free market. And so it was that we entered into a thirty year stupor based around two proposals that Thatcher mentioned in the speech:

“We [the UK government] now require, by law, that a substantial proportion of our electricity comes from sources which emit little or no carbon dioxide, and that includes a continuing important contribution from nuclear energy… [and] It is sensible to improve energy efficiency and use energy prudently; it’s sensible to improve energy efficiency and to develop alternative and sustainable sources of supply; it’s sensible to replant the forests which we consume; it’s sensible to re-examine industrial processes; it’s sensible to tackle the problem of waste.”

A combination of mendaciously named “renewables,” energy efficiency, recycling and planting trees to act as a carbon sink was all we needed to win the day. Except, of course, that this was denial too. Thatcher could not bring herself to the glaringly obvious conclusion that if the debt-based and fossil fuel enabled global economy that produced the carbon (and other greenhouse gases) was the problem, then the global economy would have to go. Thatcher was not about to sacrifice the neoliberal consensus that she had given birth to in the previous decade. 

In this way we can draw a straight line from Thatcher, through Al Gore all the way to the Pelosis of today. Each, whatever their pronouncements on the climate emergency, determined to maintain the global corporate order whatever the cost. Meanwhile, those within the 99 percent who are not still somnambulant as a result of the opioid promises of windmills and solar panels, have cottoned on to the con-trick. As distrust in politicians and mainstream media gathers pace, a growing mass of ordinary people are standing up against policies that place the cost burden of patently inadequate (renewable energy harvesting technologies account for less than three percent of the world’s energy) responses to climate change on the shoulders of those who can least afford it; while the elites continue to fly around the planet spewing greenhouse gases into the upper atmosphere. 

The danger of the false populism of the political right is that it will win the public over to the belief that climate change is a hoax. If they do so, equal fault must be laid at the door of those on the political left and centre who profess to want action on climate change but act as if it wasn’t a problem. Which is, of course, another way of saying what Thatcher should have said at the end of her otherwise ground-breaking speech – if we want to do anything about the climate emergency (and at this stage, mitigation is the best we can hope for) then we need to radically shift away from further economic growth into a managed spiral of de-growth… something that Mother Nature will likely impose upon us anyway if we choose not to act.

Science made us hesitate. Survival Acres. Feb. 19, 2019.

Increasingly dire reports related to future human survival from climate change effects are still being generated. Yet most, if not virtually of them, continue to downplay their exact wording with an emphasis, although not always clearly articulated, on the ‘opportunity’ to mitigate climate change, as if this is something to celebrate. 

Apparently, this type of documentation is intended to create impetus to finally and decisively act on climate change. Except that it won’t. You only need to examine the evidence of the recent past for the proof. 

Here is a current example of what I’m talking about. From the The Hindu Kush Himalaya Assessment (January 2019)

...

This is the palatable ‘version’ for policy maker and public consumption, and apparently still the best science can still do. It’s readable, unoffensive and waters down the devastating and destructive impacts into nice little bullet statements that are easily digestible – and just as easily, forgettable. 

Science applauds itself with churning out these kinds of documents (in massive quantities). Thousands are produced each year. I’ve yet to see a single one that actually lays out the brutal honesty that is now grossly overdue and in my opinion, urgently required on the topic of global warming and climate mitigation. Science simply won’t write it. So what does it mean then when the experts won’t tell it like it really is? 

Nothing much gets done. Few people get alarmed, policies don’t change much and the problem receives the same general non-attention and widespread ignorance as always. ‘Incremental’ efforts are akin to the often claimed ‘too little – too late’ that plagues the pathetic attempts to-date to effectively address the global issue of warming. 

For science professionals, this is state-of-the-art reporting and deemed more then adequate to inform policymakers. But is it? Globally, policy makers have continued to respond with too little, too late and even outright indifference to this topic critical to all of humanity. Small, incremental and globally inconsequential changes have been made, largely in part because science continues to give policy makers the ‘out’ they ultimately desire and almost always take in their publications – there’s still ‘time’ and ‘opportunity’ and implicit within these claims is their assumption that “we can still fix this”. 

Yet the reality is quite different – it is not being fixed, oftentimes the technology doesn’t even exist, and it absolutely is not being given the priority and the attention that it deserves if we truly want to solve this problem (and save our species). 

Having watched this circus of deception for many years, I’ve seen almost no change in the tone, type, method, severity and urgency taking place. There has been some slight improvements – but not much, and I believe that science shares the burden for the inaction on the most critical issue of our time. 

You won’t find agreement (most likely) with the science community with my position, but I’ll keep making my case, as I’ve always done. 

Science does not take a stand on political inaction. But it’s plainly obvious that they should. The methodology of science and the culture of science tries to separate itself from politics, but anybody that has worked within the science community well understands that politics plays a very large role within science. I myself worked with different scientist years ago and saw this evidence first hand. It’s only gotten worse as politics have permeated pretty much all agencies and government activities. The science community prides itself on being independent of political pressures, but it’s not true. It’s reflected in their reports and in the published materials they generate. You have to be willing to wade into these documents to find it. 

So that’s what I’ve done below. ....

...

Science is afraid or unable to actually convey the real climate emergency that exists. I’m beginning to understand the real reasons why, but that is still no excuse. 

And here’s what you will also notice, but perhaps you haven’t fully understood yet: the real urgency of the ‘science message’ on global warming and what it means for the world is not coming from science writers, authors or researchers. Isn’t that more then a bit odd?  

And why is this happening? 

Science either needs an interpreter to articulate the urgency they allege exists, or to completely revamps its methodology of communication. Not many people will accept the opinions and research of blog authors like mine, even if they are based upon the science that’s been published. I get that, but the problem I’ve identified still exists. 

Science desperately needs to make a firm, clear stance on the existential threat that exists and to stop watering down their expectations. 

I know – you know – that an extinction level event is unfolding right now and they need to flat-out tell the world’s governments, policy makers and stake-holders what is happening with no uncertainty or room for doubt and inaction. The urgency and extreme emergency tone is missing. And they need to plainly state with the same level of urgency and irrevocability what needs to be done. It’s becoming really painful to realize that either they don’t know – or won’t accept any ideas that challenge their own bias and belief systems. 

They’re not serious. And you can find that evidence right in their own published material.

Why We Stink at Tackling Climate Change. David P. Barash, Nautilus. Feb. 21, 2019.

Global threats result from human culture outrunning human biology.

What’s wrong with us? Not us Democrats, Republicans, or Americans. Rather, what’s wrong with our species, Homo sapiens? If human beings are as Hamlet suggested, “noble in reason, infinite in faculty,” then why are we facing so many problems? 

In many ways, people are better off than ever before: reduced infant mortality, longer lifespans, less poverty, fewer epidemic diseases, even fewer deaths per capita due to violence. And yet global threats abound and by nearly all measures they are getting worse: environmental destruction and wildlife extinction, ethnic and religious hatred, the specter of nuclear war, and above all, the disaster of global climate change. 

For some religious believers, the primary culprit is original sin. For ideologues of left, right, and otherwise, it’s ill-functioning political structures. From my biological perspective, it’s the deep-seated disconnect between our slow-moving, inexorable biological evolution and its fast-moving cultural counterpart—and the troublesome fact we are subject to both, simultaneously. ...

Time to Panic. David Wallace-Wells, NYT. Feb. 16, 2019.

The planet is getting warmer in catastrophic ways. And fear may be the only thing that saves us.

... David Attenborough, the mellifluous voice of the BBC’s “Planet Earth” and now an environmental conscience for the English-speaking world, put it even more bleakly: “If we don’t take action,” he said, “the collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon.”

Scientists have felt this way for a while. But they have not often talked like it. For decades, there were few things with a worse reputation than “alarmism” among those studying climate change.

... 

In 2018, their circumspection began to change, perhaps because all that extreme weather wouldn’t permit it not to. Some scientists even began embracing alarmism — particularly with that United Nations report. The research it summarized was not new, and temperatures beyond two degrees Celsius were not even discussed, though warming on that scale is where we are headed. Though the report — the product of nearly 100 scientists from around the world — did not address any of the scarier possibilities for warming, it did offer a new form of permission to the world’s scientists. The thing that was new was the message: It is O.K., finally, to freak out. Even reasonable. 

This, to me, is progress. Panic might seem counterproductive, but we’re at a point where alarmism and catastrophic thinking are valuable, for several reasons.

... 

So being alarmed is not a sign of being hysterical; when it comes to climate change, being alarmed is what the facts demand. Perhaps the only logical response.

...

By defining the boundaries of conceivability more accurately, catastrophic thinking makes it easier to see the threat of climate change clearly. For years, we have read in newspapers as two degrees of warming was invoked as the highest tolerable level, beyond which disaster would ensue. Warming greater than that was rarely discussed outside scientific circles. And so it was easy to develop an intuitive portrait of the landscape of possibilities that began with the climate as it exists today and ended with the pain of two degrees, the ceiling of suffering. 

In fact, it is almost certainly a floor. By far the likeliest outcomes for the end of this century fall between two and four degrees of warming. And so looking squarely at what the world might look like in that range — two degrees, three, four — is much better preparation for the challenges we will face than retreating into the comforting relative normalcy of the present.

The day the world ended. Ian Welsh.