In climate news: oops we’ve passed the line already.
…there is one type of rare, gargantuan, towering lie that makes all the other mass lies throughout human history seem like frightened, scurrying, little adorable fibs.
It is a lie told worldwide by hundreds of thousands of institutions, elected officials, many universities, legacy news, some large non-profits and eventually—as the deception entered mainstream culture—even by ourselves, to ourselves, every single moment of every day…
This massive lie can best be summed up as “when it comes to climate change… we have more time.”
To be clear, we are not talking about the kind of total climate denial one would find on the extremist, lunatic fringe inhabited by the likes of Alex Jones or the current U.S. President. And we’re not referring to cartoonish hucksters and “climate skeptics” like Joe Rogan or Jordan Peterson.
Polling shows only 14.8 percent of Americans deny the basic sixth grade science behind global warming. To put that in perspective, as much as 10 percent of the population still believes the Earth is flat.
No, the monstrous, misshapen garden colossus lie we’re referring to is subscribed to by most of the U.S., has stopped and slowed climate action far more than outright denial, and keeps growing and growing. Every day this deception whispers seductively in the ears of mankind: “global warming is real but not urgent… Keep doing what you’re doing.”
Or to put it another way, “global warming is real and urgent but let’s ignore it anyway.”
I read a thing in some local outlet last week about why we keep doing something as colossally stupid as having fighter jets zoom around by way of entertainment for a few days every August. The climate toll is massive. Why do we keep doing it? Oh you know, people like it. Shrug shrug. It’s not that we say it’s not urgent, it’s that we say it’s fun and we like it.
Like all grand lies, “we have more time” takes many different forms, often focus-grouped. There are the lofty-sounding promises to reach “Net-zero emissions by 2050,” as if 24 years from now was soon enough. There are the queries of “What’s your carbon footprint?,” as if individual people with plastic bags or straws were the problem and not gigantic multinational corporations. There’s the accusation that anyone who expresses urgency is a “doomer.” There are those who treat climate as an abstraction to win political campaigns, first arguing that the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act was a victory despite doing nowhere near enough to address the scale of climate collapse, and more recently that Democrats should just stop talking about climate and focus on more “winnable” issues. Most damaging and common of all, there are those who simply don’t mention it.
It’s the old joke about the guy who fell off a tall building and said “So far so good.”
And with a bump coming next year from a growing, historic El Niño up to 1.7 degrees celsius average warming, likely to cause agricultural failure and food shortages, we are staring right at the vaunted 2C number.
Why is 2C so vaunted?
Let’s do the context thing again: 2C will mean we have completely left the stable climate period known as the Holocene. This is the 11,000-year-old era that has given us large-scale crop and livestock agriculture, which gave us cities, written language, modern science and medicine, and warm beds and showers.
Before that, for hundreds of thousands of years in the Pleistocene era, humans (and our hominid ancestors) spent most of their time running from drought, fires, floods, extreme cold and heat, predators, and each other.
What we grow up with is what we think is normal. It’s hard to wrap our heads around the fact that all this can go away, and that in the meantime all this can get very unpleasant indeed.
A joint study by the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries and the University of Exeter suggests that a 2C temperature increase by 2050—which we are hurtling towards, with no plans of slowing down—could result in two billion deaths. And that is virtually the best-case scenario, as temperature rise predictions have worsened and put 1.5C of warming out of reach. According to the United Nations, in order to limit warming to 2C, we would need “emissions to drop around 35 per cent by 2035.” Even if “current national commitments” were fully implemented they “would cut emissions only 12 to 15 per cent by that date.”
The other scenario, which scientists now say “recent data aligns more closely with,” is 3C of warming. At that level, the Exeter authors warn of up to 4 billion deaths. Four billion. That is half the planet. In 26 years or less. Even for those lucky enough to survive the worst weather events, life as we know it would cease to exist due to war, involuntary mass migration, and “catastrophic mortality events from disease, malnutrition, thirst and conflict.” According to the lead author of the report, there is no realistic plan in place to avoid this scenario.
But…so far so good.
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