The climate crisis has arrived and is accelerating
The world’s people face “untold suffering due to the climate crisis” unless there are major transformations to global society, according to a stark warning from more than 11,000 scientists.
“We declare clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency,” it states. “To secure a sustainable future, we must change how we live. [This] entails major transformations in the ways our global society functions and interacts with natural ecosystems.”
There is no time to lose, the scientists say: “The climate crisis has arrived and is accelerating faster than most scientists expected. It is more severe than anticipated, threatening natural ecosystems and the fate of humanity.”
The statement is published in the journal BioScience on the 40th anniversary of the first world climate conference, which was held in Geneva in 1979. The statement was a collaboration of dozens of scientists and endorsed by further 11,000 from 153 nations. The scientists say the urgent changes needed include ending population growth, leaving fossil fuels in the ground, halting forest destruction, and slashing meat eating.
Also stop building on vulnerable coasts and stop rebuilding on flooded coasts. Also stop draining rivers and lakes and aquifers.
Other “profoundly troubling signs from human activities” selected by the scientists include booming air passenger numbers and world GDP growth. “The climate crisis is closely linked to excessive consumption of the wealthy lifestyle,” they said.
As a result of these human activities, there are “especially disturbing” trends of increasing land and ocean temperatures, rising sea levels and extreme weather events, the scientists said: “Despite 40 years of global climate negotiations, with few exceptions, we have have largely failed to address this predicament. Especially worrisome are potential irreversible climate tipping points. These climate chain reactions could cause significant disruptions to ecosystems, society, and economies, potentially making large areas of Earth uninhabitable.”
Look at California right now, then multiply that by a big number. Then try to figure out where the food will come from – keeping in mind that the coral reefs will all be dead.
Meanwhile the Democratic candidates keep insisting we can’t make major structural changes. They accept global warming, but just want to fiddle around the edges, because they don’t want to suggest that voters give anything up.
At the beginning of the decade we are about to leave behind – the decade of Trump, the alt right, and post-truth politics – the 2010s were described as the last decade in which the human species still had a realistic chance of keeping global warming below 2 °C. Of course we didn’t seize this realistic chance while we had it, but kept running as fast as we could in the wrong direction, which means that any lingering hope must be sought in the more or less unrealistic realm. We already know where such hope will definitely not be found: It will not come from our elected politicians. That’s the option that has already failed for 30 years and can safely be ruled out (If we ask why this is so, the answer doesn’t put the electorate in a very flattering light either). Nor is there any real hope that each of us (i.e. the same people who have consistently been opting for increased consumption at every turn and voting for politicians spouting “Drill, Baby, Drill!” and “All of the Above”) is individually going to cut his/her emissions to the degree required by the laws of physics, especially not within the context of a world order that capitalism has turned into a global version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma with permanent defection as the only viable strategy.
A slightly more hopeful route (advocated years ago by James Hansen) might be taking the guilty parties to court. This is currently happening in my country where an alliance of environmentalist organizations is suing the state to prevent drilling for oil in the Arctic. The environmentalists lost the first round, however, and although I fully support the ongoing appeal (including putting my money where my mouth is), I can’t honestly say that I’m optimistic. If the Trump-era has taught us one thing, it’s that the division of power is largely fictional, that foxes are guarding all the hen-houses, and that power and money tend to prevail regardless of what the law might say.
The least unrealistic hope as I see it is to get a minority of people sufficiently riled up to engage in massive acts of civil disobedience and physically block the extraction, transportation and burning of fossil fuels at every turn with their bodies. This is already happening to some extent of course, and we have already seen some partial victories, but not on a large enough scale to make a serious dent. Every government, as well as every major political party, in the industrial world has made it abundantly clear that they are definitely going to take us over the edge if we let them. My last desperate hope at this stage is that enough people will decide to not let them. Of course in a world of collective ego-centrism, instant gratification, short-term thinking, and even shorter attention spans, a world of alternative facts and rampant anti-intellectualism, a world where the only ideology more powerful than both neo-liberalism and the alt-right is a bland, indifferent centrism that would rather se the Earth turned to a desert than take a strong, bold stance on anything, this is a very faint hope indeed.
Bjarte, that last has been happening for at least 40-50 years, so yeah, don’t think it’s gonna help.
I don’t think taking them to court will help in the US, either, because the courts have all been packed with Reagan/Bush/Bush/Trump appointees. Some of them are principled, some are partisan, but sooner or later, drill baby drill becomes the message of so much of the US.
In short, at this point, the only real hope for change is a total change of society – we must build a society, a pubic servant class, a working class, etc, that is committed to change, that wants to make a difference, and that believes it is necessary. How do we do that? The only things I can think of is messaging – movies, music, television, books, have for many decades been selling the allure of the car, of shopping, of eating large chunks of meat, of smoking, of everything. We turned around the smoking fad with better designed mass media, maybe it would help for global warming.
The problem is, most of the infotainment world is woefully undereducated in science, and tends to go with the simple, easy, and often New-Agey answers. When the scientists do show up to help, they ignore them, rewrite them, or simply dismiss them as boring. That doesn’t bode well for getting the message out there on this issue, because there are more wrong ways to fix this than there are right ones.
Hence the formulation “not on a large enough scale to make a serious dent”. As I said, we are already out of realistic solutions. I just think every other solution is even less realistic. Mind You, it’s now just a matter of keeping fossil fuels in the ground/out of the atmosphere for as long as the act of civil disobedience lasts (although that is certainly a worthy goal in itself). There is also:
1. Weakening fossil fuel companies by cutting into their profits and forcing them to spend large resources fighting off endless attacks.
2. Creating disincentives to invest in fossil fuel companies by making it clear to potential investors that their investments will not be safe.
3. Slowing down the extraction of fossil fuels in every possible way, thus buying time for renewables to gain a more solid footing (and hopefully out-compete the fossil fuel companies).
4. Showing the world that not everybody is prepared to go down without a fight, thus hopefully inspiring others to resist in any way they can/dare.
5. Delegitimizing the whole industry.
I agree that a total change of society and culture is needed. I just don’t see it happening with anything like the speed required (if at all). My understanding of the psychological literature – limited as it is – is that people tend to become more conservative and tribal in times of crisis, which doesn’t bode at all well for the future. The number of refugees from the war in Syria (a conflict plausibly linked, at least in part, to climate change) totally pales in comparison to the numbers we can expect as large parts of India and China become uninhabitable (as climate models project). Yet even this relatively modest number has been enough to make fascism mainstream once again in the Western world. In such a light, a new Hitler seems far more likely than a new enlightenment from below.
I think the “information deficit model” of climate apathy and inaction is pretty much dead and buried at this point. Nobody has done more to message the public on climate change than Bill McKibben, yet even he has concluded that writing more books or articles or blog posts, making more movies or TV shows, giving more talks. presenting more compelling arguments etc. is almost certainly not going to do the trick. As he puts it, we have already won the argument over climate change – decades ago, still we are losing the fight. Because the fight was never really about facts, or data, or logic, or arguments. The fight is about money and power and ideology. McKibben therefore advocates taking the fight directly to the fossil fuel companies themselves (To be fair, I’m not sure I understand what You mean by “messaging”. Don’t hesitate to correct me if I’m misrepresenting Your views ).
In the category of “alleged solutions not even worth mentioning” I place geo-engineering and letting the market take care of it (both instances of the same kind of thinking that got us into this mess in the first place).
*it’s not just a matter of keeping fossil fuels in the ground/out of the atmosphere
But this is going to be the solution offered once enough of the “right people” change their minds and decide the problem is real and that they should really do something about it.
The geoengineering solution will appeal to those who want the promise of a quick fix (without much though put towards unintended or unexpected consequences) without having to do much themselves.
It will appeal to the fossil fuel industry because it will let them keep doing what they’re doing a little bit longer, much like medication is used by some to allow the continued eating of foods that they know are bad for them, in place of changing their diet to reduce or cut out those items altogether.
The geoengineering model will appeal to those industries that will stand to make a shit-ton of money from it.
If there is some single, large , sudden, mass-casualty disaster (as opposed to the continuous, incremental disaster currently underway) that can be “reliably” attributed to climate change (that is, sufficiently convincing, or undeniable enough to those who are in a position that allows them to sit on the fence and block meaningful action), expect a sudden uptick in interest in geoengineering solutions.
[…] a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on The climate crisis has arrived and is […]
Yeah, let’s put some more crap up there. It worked so well last time…
It’s frightening how many of my students (not to mention a science colleague who should know better) think that the real answer is to move to another planet – the moon or Mars, usually. Some of them think we’ll find a habitable planet around another star, which I suppose is possible, but it never occurs to them that we might not be able to get there.
No need to fix anything. We trashed out this house, so burn it down and move seems to be a popular answer.
Then there is a solution I’ve seen in more than one place: No need to worry. God’s got it. Yeah, well, God needs to do some fixing immediately if he doesn’t want to be spending eternity surrounded by the people he peopled this earth with and promised eternal bliss in paradise. If I were God, they aren’t the people I would choose to spend eternity with, but if God is like Trump, then all he wants is to be adored and doesn’t care about the personality of those adoring him.
Bjarte, I agree that it isn’t information deficit. We have all the information we need, and then some.
The vast majority of people who think this is a possible, useful or good answer are not going to be making the trip. Like the not-so-well-off whom the Republicans can get to oppose taxing the super-rich (because they hope to be super-rich themselves someday) these people are not going to get a boarding pass. Launching mass to escape velocity from the bottom of Earth’s gravity well is horrendously expensive. It took a Saturn V to launch three humans and the stuff they needed to live for a couple of weeks. Until technology indistinguishable from magic is developed, there will be no mass migration from Earth.
Barring Earth undergoing a runaway greenhouse effect and turning into a slightly cooler Venus in the process, it will remain much more habitable than anywhere else in the solar system. No doubt about it: things will get really bad to a higher value of really bad than humans have ever encountered, but unless we try very hard, there will still be water, soil and an atmosphere. They are leaving a planet with all the stuff of life to go try to live on places that have none. Even a post-nuclear holocaust Earth would be a more hospitable place than anywhere else around the sun. It might not support much, if any, civilization, but it will be more liveable than anywhere else we’re going to find in any humanly useful period of time.
As for finding habitable planets in other solar systems, that’s just fantasy land. Not that they don’t exist, but any will be too far away and too hard to get to. When the Polynesians explored and populated the Pacific, they weren’t travelling for decades (or centuries) through a hard vacuum. They had a history of such travel to draw upon. They could fish on the way. They could breathe. Going to another star is many orders of magnitude harder. If we can’t live in a closed loop system on Earth, what makes us think we’re going to be able to do it anywhere else in the solar system, or on board the ships that would take humans to other solar systems? And if the habital planet(s) we might be lucky enough to find are already inhabited? Well, we start the whole game of genocide, plunder, extinction and usurpation all over again, just under a different star in the sky.
It’s fine, life has held on through worse conditions… Oh you’re talking about humanity? Ha, lol…
Not Bruce, you sound like you’re channeling me – but this paragraph is so key. People just don’t get it. If you are in the frying pan, you might still be better off than in the fire.
And besides, we really don’t know how to build ecosystems from scratch even here on earth (I know; I’m a restoration ecologist). We struggle to build them with all the materials right here that we can get easily; how in the world would we do it on a distant planet?
We could save every ecosystem on earth for far less than it would cost us to build a small colony on the moon – not to mention more distant bodies within the solar system. Getting out of the solar system? Forget it.
People think it sounds neat, they think science can do anything, they think it’s just Luddites refusing to accept the natural progress of the human mind, etc etc etc. Too many people are unwilling to accept that there are limits.
YNNB had it right above when he said that ‘Until technology indistinguishable from magic is developed, there will be no mass migration from Earth.’ As he and Iknklast say, even the establishment of a minor colony on Mars would require the devotion and agreement to focus a good sized chunk of the World’s resources on that endeavour.
The SF fanboy in me exults at such a goal, but the realist says, lets, fix up this shit instead.
Yes, fanboy guilty as charged here, too. My inner 8 year old is hard to reason with.
Unfortunately doing this, or, fixing this shit up, to paraphrase Rob, is looked upon with as much enthusiasm as being made to eat your vegetables instead of filling up on dessert. If we could turn this attitude around and treat it with the urgency, commitment and ingenuity* that its actual World War III level of priority deserves As noted by iknklast in the comments of the guest post that was spawned by this comment thread…), that would be a good thing.
(* Let’s face it; under wartime pressure, people can be devilishly clever and fiendishly inventive when it comes to finding ways of killing people. Being able to unleash this sort of creativity and industiousness towards “fixing this shit” instead, would be a huge advantage.)
On any future Lunar/Martian/space station/whatever settlement (or the ships travelling to and between these places), one of the most serious of crimes will be tampering with, or contaminating, the atmospheric, water, or other life support systems. It will be considered tantamount to mass murder. On our own planet, such tampering and contamination has, until very recently, been largely ignored, or treated as seriously as littering. Earth’s capacity to absorb our wastes and toxins (if it was thought about at all), was considered to be limitless, or at least treated as such. We’re now living with th the blowback. Much too slowly we are learning that:
1)You can’t throw anything “away” There is no away.
2)You can never do just one thing. There are always consequences and knock-on effects.
3)There are no “side effects” or “byproducts.” A process or system produces wanted and unwanted end products. The unwanted results or effects don’t go way just because they are unwanted or have no market. (See #1 above.)
By long tradition the profitable bits of economic activity have been appropriated for private gain, while the externalities, waste, or pollution have been dumped in the commons for others to deal with, at no cost to the purses of those doing the dumping. Earth is just a bit bigger base in space, (one that we were lucky enough to be born on rather than one we had to build ourselves [Could that be part of the difference?] ) and we can’t afford to let anybody fuck around with our life support system. It’s tantamount to mass murder here, too.