It’s the climate, stupid
A decade is a long time in the context of climate change. In dark irony it’s also practically all we have left to make the necessary transition. The days of climate deniers shrieking ‘warmists!’ at scientists, accusing every activist of ideological leanings — being ‘watermelons’ (green on the outside, red on the inside) and claiming that for climate change campaigners such as George Monbiot and NASA’s Jim Hansen; ‘Hanging is too good for such ineffable toerags’, are hopefully behind us.
The climate sceptics have been understandably quiet in recent months as wildfires killed hundreds in raging infernos in first Portugal, then Greece, then California, and even the boreal forests of Scandinavia dried dangerously into tinderbox conditions in the oppressive summer heat. FUD tactics tend to flounder when the palpable flames of evidence are licking at the threshold. The real fear is here and that fear is real. Even the Sun declaimed ‘the world is on fire!’. A climate denier has yet to start an insurance company in defiance of these losses. We await the day.
It’s hard to admit how wrong we have been and for how long. Concerns about burning billions of years of fossilized sunshine in the blink of a geological eye are almost as old as the industrial revolution that first raised them. Climate change is not a black swan, something that takes us by surprise and with massive far-reaching impacts like 9/11, it is a white swan that has been swimming towards us with grim, relentless predictability for over a century. Where’s the effective commentary been on that?
The progress achieved through the harnessing of relatively cheap, available and abundant fossil fuels has been extraordinary. But when the pursuit of further progress by the same means is creating the climatic changes that threaten all future progress, a so-called ‘progress trap’, then doing things differently is not just preferential it’s existential. This is the grist. That our very system might be suicidal is difficult to absorb. It is the sharpest cognitive dissonance for our core beliefs. As Lemn Sisay said in his poem ‘What if?: “Let me get it right, what if we got it wrong, what if we weakened ourselves getting strong?”
Little wonder then that the ‘shock’ of this revelation has built to a shrill crescendo over umpteen Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports and increasingly desperate and fevered Conference of the Parties (COP) summits like the most recent in the dark winter days of late 2017 in Katowice, Poland. Sponsored by a coal company. History may laugh sardonically at our lack of a civilizational sense of irony. Contrarian commentary loves to fly, probably on Ryannair, in the face of this consolidated opinion.
Because this is beyond ideology now. The science is as ‘done’ as science ever can be. Those who screech ‘paradigm’ and claim orthodoxy is strangling reality are not just outliers, they are like alchemists claiming that because no-one has turned base metal to gold, doesn’t mean it can’t be done. It might in principle be possible that the Anthropocene is not destabilizing our climate to an existential extent, but in manifest practice it is looking extremely unlikely.
In a system as complex as global climate there will always be anomalies and inconsistencies, just as there are always exceptional, ‘miraculous’ cancer survivors. But as Sir Paul Nurse put it to James Delingpole in what I think is still a seminal moment in climate commentary: “if a dear relative was suffering from a fatal disease, would you opt for the “consensus” treatment recommended by doctors, or advice to drink more orange juice offered by a fringe maverick quack?” To which Delingpole screamed ‘intellectual rape’ and formally complained to the BBC. The consensus is pretty much unequivocally in. Now let’s comment and debate on our response to the diagnosis. Those prescribing ‘more of the same’ are like the Doctor’s backing fag adverts.
In whose interests? Is the burning question. When supposed ‘thinktanks’ refuse to divulge their funding sources we are in deep trouble. The climate action we need will involve winners and losers. That much is inevitable. But we cannot let the losers, like the fossil fuel businesses, dictate the pace of change. That way lies the fast track to Armageddon. With ‘sustainable’ shareholder returns.
Public support for climate action is consistently strong. With the usual caveats of led-concerns over the economy, health service and education. But perhaps if the truly systemic nature of the jolt needed was comprehended, we’d realise that we could reboot almost everything, from energy generation, through transport, to food production, and build a resilient economy that also served people and the environment. That is actually simpler than rocket science.
Twelve years is how long the IPCC says we have to make the shift required. But its not a dozen years until we change. That’s how long we have to make the change. Every month matters. A decade or two of obfuscation and stalling has only intensified our task and made it much harder. We’re entering a massive chicane. A pinch-point. The window of opportunity is small and the time is short. The countdown drumbeat has begun.
As Churchill said “Owing to past neglect, in the face of the plainest warnings, we have now entered upon a period of danger…The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences.” The moment for ‘peace in our time’ has passed. Which is why the emergence of movements like the Extinction Rebellion are timely; ‘Tell the truth. And act like that truth is real’ is a reasonable demand in unreasonable times. The essential transition happens on our watch. In our careers. In our lives. It needs to be radical.
This transformation could be transcendent. Raising a traditionally narrow minded nationalism of ‘blood and soil’ to one blood, one earth. Climate change is a test of our civilizational maturity. It’s likely any intelligent, curious species such as ours will eventually bump up against the limits of its planetary environment. It is how we respond that is critical. Caught in the perpetual melee of the fierce urgency of now, me, here, over the timeless, global ‘we’. Maybe this is our curse?
Knowingly allowing the true hideousness of climate change to unfold is technically genocide. The biggest in history. Any commentary that obfuscates this is complicit. Let the debate on solutions commence. But let’s deflate the Ozymandian arrogance that got us here. And also appreciate that climate chaos is driving desperate migration that will turn from a trickle to a flood unless we act decisively and in ways that are often politically uncomfortable. The alternative is nightmarish.
King Cnut was infamously misinterpreted. Sitting enthroned below the high tide line his alleged arrogance was inundated by the rising waters. In fact he originally set out to humbly demonstrate the inability of humanity to resist the inevitable elements. Only now he is wrong. We can and are influencing those elements consciously, and to the detriment of all. We are the first generation in history to be simultaneously aware of our potentially fatal civilizational dilemma, whilst having the means to resolve it. It’s a live and real choice. We fix this together, or all go down together. Those who continue to claim otherwise are a bunch of Cnuts.
Ed Gillespie is a writer, speaker, futurist and poet. In 2007/8 he circumnavigated the world without flying and wrote ‘Only Planet — a flightfree adventure around the world’. He is a serial entrepreneur and an adviser to or investor in a number of ethical businesses. Ed is also a facilitator with the Forward Institute’s responsible leadership programme, a Director of Greenpeace UK and Co-Founder of Futerra
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