Nowa Fantastyka Nov 2018
I’ve been in a funk since the International Panel on Climate Change released their latest report last October. I’m in a funk as I type these words; chances are I’ll still be in a funk when you read them a month down the road. If you happened to read my blog post of October 261, you’ll know why. If you didn’t, the short version is:
• There isn’t a hope in hell that we’ll meet the goal set out in the Paris Accords, to limit global warming to 2°C;
• Even if we did meet that goal, the result would be apocalyptic;
• The results would be merely disastrous if we managed to keep the increase down to 1.5°C—to give just one example, we’d only lose 70-90% of the world’s corals instead of all of them—but the only way to do that would be to—among other things—go carbon-free within thirty years, cut our meat consumption by 90%, and invent new unicorn technologies to suck gigatonnes of carbon back out of the atmosphere.
Global disaster is now our best-case scenario, and the chances we’ll even clear that low bar are remote. Meanwhile, people have already shrugged and gone back to posting cat videos on Facebook.
Think of this month’s column as a kind of coda to October’s blog post. Today’s take-home message is: that post was way too light-hearted. It took the IPCC at its word: that we had twelve years to get started, and if we did there was at least a chance to save something from the fire.
The reality, it seems, is that there may not be any chance at all.
The first thing to keep in mind is that IPCC reports are scientific, and science is innately conservative. If a result is only 90% certain, science rejects it. The usual threshold for statistical significance is 95%, often 99%; anything less is chalked up to random chance. Meaning that—especially in complex, noisy systems like a planetary ecosphere—real effects get lost in noise and statistical rigor. Your living room could be in flames and nothing might show up in the stats; only when your bed catches fire do the results become “significant”.
The second thing to keep in mind is that even among—especially among—those who accept the dangers posed by climate change, there exists an almost pathological compulsion to remain upbeat no matter what. A good example is the reaction to an article by David Wallace-Wells—“The Uninhabitable Earth”—that appeared in New York Magazine back in 2017. It was an article that pulled no punches, that laid out the future in store for us without regard to the conservative blinkers of the 95% threshold—and scientists and activists alike decried it as gloomy and counterproductive.
October’s IPCC report has largely vindicated Wallace-Wells, but the Pathology of Hope remains. We still want to save the world, after all, and too much despair just paralyzes people: if you don’t offer hope, you’ll never inspire folks to change. If you don’t sugarcoat things a bit, people won’t have a reason to try and make things better.
You don’t tell people they’re doomed. Even if they are.
Which brings us to Jem Bendell, of the University of Cumbria. Bendell’s PhD is in International Policy, not climate science, but he can read the writing on the wall as well as anyone (and our predicament’s rooted in politics after all, not science). He notes that we could cut our CO2 emissions by 25% and those savings would be wiped out by the heating that’s already resulted from the ongoing loss of Arctic ice (and consequent lowered albedo). He points out that IPCC forecasts have always proven too optimistic, that observed trends always seem to end up being worse than the worst-case scenarios predicted just a few years earlier. He notes that many IPCC projections assume linear increases, while the observed data are more consistent with nonlinear—possibly exponential—ones.
Bendell doesn’t think we have twelve years to start, doesn’t give us until mid-century to zero out our emissions. He says widespread societal collapse is inevitable, and it’s going to start in just ten years. (Interestingly, this is about the same time that a variety of pathogens—following warmer temperatures into new environments—are expected to kick off a series of pandemics that hollow out the world’s major cities, according to parasitologist and evolutionary biologist Daniel Brooks.) Bendell says it’s time to give up on futile hopes of saving society as we know it. He coins the term “Deep Adaptation” to describe the processes by which we might deal with the collapse of modern society: ways to prioritize the things we might save, accept the loss of everything else, salvage what we can and hope to build something more sustainable from the wreckage.
The first step, he says, is to grieve for the things we’ve lost. I myself would put it less charitably: for the things we’ve destroyed, I would say.
Bendell wrote up his analysis in a paper titled “Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy.” He couldn’t get it published. Or rather, the journal he sent it to would only publish it if he rewrote the text to make it less “disheartening”.2
Of course, it’s easy to discount one voice. The problem is there might well be a whole chorus backing him up, a chorus we haven’t been allowed to hear thanks to well-intentioned censors who insist facts pass some kind of Hope Test before they’re allowed out in public. The house burns down around us. The fire department was shut down during the latest round of Austerity Cuts. Doesn’t matter. Can’t let people lose hope.
I have hope, though a distant one. The Earth has experienced mass extinctions before. Five times past the planet has lost 70-90% of its species, and it has always sprung back. A few weedy, impoverished survivors have always been enough to pick up the baton, speciate and bloom into brand-new ecospheres full of wonder and biodiversity. It may take ten or twenty million years, but it happens eventually. It will happen this time too.
My hope is that nothing like us will be around next time, to fuck it all up again.