OLIVER MORTON is the chief news and features editor of Nature. He is the author of Mapping Mars and Eating the Sun.
The truth of this dangerous idea is fairly obvious. Environmental crises are a fundamental part of the history of the earth: There have been sudden and dramatic temperature excursions, severe glaciations, vast asteroid and comet impacts. Yet the earth is still here, unscathed.
There have been mass extinctions associated with some of these events, while other mass extinctions may well have been triggered by subtler internal changes to the biosphere. But none of them seem to have done long-term harm. A lot of interesting species died at the end of the Permian period, 250 million years ago, making the early part of the subsequent Triassic perhaps a little duller than it might have been, but there is no evidence that any fundamentally important earth processes did not eventually recover. I strongly suspect that not a single basic biogeochemical innovation—the sorts of things that underlie photosynthesis and the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle, the sulfur cycle, and so on—has been lost in earth’s 4-billion-year lifetime.
Against this background, the current carbon/climate crisis seems pretty small beer. The change in mean global temperatures seems quite unlikely to be much greater than the regular cyclical change between glacial and interglacial climates. Land-use change is immense, but it’s not clear how long that will last, and there are rich seedbanks in the soil that will allow restoration. If fossil-fuel use goes unchecked, carbon dioxide levels may rise as high as they were in the Eocene, some 50 million years ago, and do so at such a rate that they cause a transient spike in ocean acidity. But they will not stay at those high levels, and the Eocene was not such a terrible place.
The earth doesn’t need ice caps or permafrost or any particular sea level. Such things come and go and rise and fall as a matter of course. The planet’s living systems adapt and flourish, sometimes in a way that provides negative feedback, occasionally with a positive feedback that amplifies the change. A planet that made it through the massive biogeochemical unpleasantness of the late Permian is in little danger from a doubling (or even quintupling) of the very low carbon dioxide level that preceded the Industrial Revolution, or from the loss of a lot of forests and reefs, or from the demise of half its species, or from the thinning of its ozone layer at high latitudes.
None of this is to say that we, as people, should not worry about global change; we should worry a lot. Climate change may not hurt the planet, but it hurts people. In particular, it will hurt people who are too poor to adapt. Significant climate change will alter rainfall patterns and probably patterns of extreme events as well, in ways that could easily threaten the food security of hundreds of millions of people supporting themselves through subsistence agriculture or pastoralism. It will have a huge effect on the lives of the relatively small number of people in places where sea ice is an important part of the environment (and it seems unlikely that anything we do now can change that). In other, more densely populated places, local environmental and biotic change may have similarly sweeping effects.
Secondary to this, the loss of species, both known and unknown, will be experienced by some as a form of damage that goes beyond any deterioration in ecosystem services. Many people will feel themselves and their world diminished by such extinctions—even when those have no practical consequences—despite the fact that they cannot ascribe an objective value to their loss. One does not have to share the values of these people to recognize their sincerity.
All these effects are excellent reasons to act. Yet many people in the various green movements feel compelled to add on the notion that the planet itself is in crisis, or doomed; that all life on earth is threatened. In a world where that rhetoric is common, pointing out that this eschatological approach to the environment is baseless can be dangerous.
Since the 1970s, the environmental movement has based much of its appeal on personifying the planet and making it seem like a single entity, then seeking to place it in some ways “in our care.” It is a very powerful notion and one that benefits from the hugely influential iconographic backing of the first pictures of earth from space. It has inspired much of the good that the environmental movement has done. The idea that the planet is not in peril could thus undermine the movement’s power. This is one reason that people react against the idea so strongly.
If the belief that the planet is in peril were merely wrong, there might be an excuse for ignoring it. But the planet-in-peril idea is an easy target for those who, for various reasons, argue against any action at all on the carbon/climate crisis. Here, bad science is a hostage to fortune. What’s worse, the idea distorts environmental reasoning. Emphasizing the nonissue of the health of the planet rather than the real issues of effects that harm people leads to a general preference for averting change rather than adapting to it—even though providing the where-withal for adaptation will often be the most rational response.
Some environmentalists, and perhaps some environmental reporters, will argue that the inflated rhetoric that trades on the mistaken idea of a planet in peril is necessary in order to keep the show on the road. The idea that people can be more easily persuaded to save the planet (which is not in danger) than their fellow human beings (who are) is an unpleasant and cynical one—another dangerous idea, not least because it may hold some truth. But if putting the planet at the center of the debate is a way of involving everyone, of making us feel that we’re all in this together, then one can’t help noticing that the ploy isn’t working all that well. In the rich nations, many people may indeed believe that the planet is in danger, but they don’t believe they are in danger, and perhaps as a result they’re not clamoring for change loud enough, or in the right way, to bring it about.
There is also a problem of learned helplessness. I suspect people are flattered, in a rather perverse way, by the idea that their lifestyle threatens the whole planet rather than just the livelihoods of millions of people they have never met. But the same sense of scale that flatters may also enfeeble. They may come to think that the problems are too great for them to do anything about.
Rolling carbon/climate issues into the great moral imperative of improving the lives of the poor seems more likely to be a sustainable long-term strategy. The most important thing about environmental change is that it hurts people; the basis of our response should be human solidarity.
The planet will take care of itself.