Worse than the worst case (Jonathon Porritt)

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Worse than the worst case

There’s a great episode of The Simpsonswhich has been much in my mind this week. Lisa Simpson is asked by her teacher to do an essay on what her hometown of Springfield would look like in 2050. Lisa’s vision is a decidedly gloomy one, with most of Springfield under water as a direct consequence of accelerating climate change and rising sea levels. Her teachers are so appalled that they decide the best thing they can do is prescribe for Lisa a course of ‘Ignorital’ to ensure that she puts all her worst fears behind her!

I encounter a lot of people who have clearly been on ‘Ignorital’ for quite a long time – and I sometimes wonder whether I’m self-medicating myself when I’m not concentrating! I find it hard to imagine what life would be like if I had genuinely come to the irrevocable conclusion that it was too late to do anything serious about preventing runaway climate change. I can’t imagine how I would persist with (let alone continue to feel excited by) the kind of advocacy work that I spend most of my life doing with Forum for the Future and the Prince of Wales’s Business & the Environment Programme.

For me, this has been an ongoing internal dialogue for at least the last five years. It gets a little bit more painful, every year, with spikes of self-doubt obliging me to keep on checking the state of the science.

And having just finished reading Clive Hamilton’s excellent (but deeply disturbing!) Requiem for a Species, I’m now going to have to think it all through all over again.

Clive is one of those who has come to the conclusion that it is indeed too late – whatever we now do – to ensure that average temperature increases can be held below that 2C degree threshold by the end of the century.

The truth of it is that this is a view that is gaining ground amongst more and more scientists and informed commentators. The worst case in the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assumes emissions of greenhouse gases increasing by 2.5% per annum. In fact, they are currently increasing by 3% per annum.

What’s more, that ‘worst case scenario’ takes no account of what are known as ‘natural feedback loops’ – where natural systems (such as the permafrost in the Arctic, or rainforests in the Amazon) begin to ‘adapt’ as a direct consequence of the warming that we humans have already set in train. And there’s now growing evidence of these feedback loops beginning to kick in.

The IPCC has estimated the temperature increase that would result from its worst case as going as high as 4.6C degrees . More than twice the 2C degree threshold. And it’s worth bearing in mind here that at 3C degrees, the Greenland Ice Sheet is definitively in irreversible meltdown.

We know all this. It’s the kind of analysis that underpined the Kyoto Protocol all those years ago, and which now informs the UK’s Climate Change Act and other policy interventions. But Clive Hamilton argues that:

“Despite our pretensions to rationality, scientific facts are fighting against more powerful forces. Apart from institutional factors that have prevented early action – the power of industry, the rise of money politics, and bureaucratic inertia, we have never really believed the dire warnings of the scientists. Unreasoning optimism is one of humankind’s greatest virtues and most dangerous foibles”.

The reasons not to subscribe to the ‘too late’ hypothesis get just a little bit weaker every year. Countervailing scientific (and majority) opinion indicates that we’ve still got a ‘window of time’ to ensure first that emissions peak as soon as possible and then reduce dramatically from that point on. That still allows us to think that we might manage this transition into an ultra low-carbon world without the traumatic dislocation that is otherwise going to beset us.

This countervailing view depends, of course, on the assumption that the politicians will be able to do what needs to be done before that window comes crashing down on us.

I haven’t entirely given up on that possibility. Clive has. With painful intensity, he describes how he went through that barrier himself, renouncing spurious optimism and ending up in profound mourning for the loss of hope, for his children, for the Earth, for the future of humankind – hence the Requiem.

He is still sympathetic to those still on the other side of that line of hopefulness, but indirectly challenges our integrity:

“Denial requires a wilful mis-reading of the science, a romantic view of the ability of political institutions to respond, or face divine intervention. Climate Pollyannas adopt the same tactic as doom-mongers but in reverse: instead of taking a very small risk of disaster and exaggerating it, they take a very high risk of disaster and minimise it”.

But it is not all as bleak as it may sound. Following Joanna Macy’s powerful dictum, “Despair, Accept, Act”, the book ends with a very positive message as to how we just need to re-orientate ourselves in this more realistic world.

But all very challenging stuff.

Clive Hamilton’s Requiem for a Species; Why we resist the truth about Climate Change is published by Earthscan

Posted by Jonathon Porritt on April 22, 2010 1:00 PM | Permalink

Comments (5)

I also restructured my career around environmental goals (formerly an aerospace engineer, I now design green buildings). So I face this question every day.

The only conclusion that I've come to is to accept that having hope, which I must have in order to do what I do, is not rational. And it isn't supposed to be. Hope isn't about what is most probable -- it is about what is potentially possible.

I do believe that a rational analysis of the physical, technical and (most relevantly) political/psychological/cultural challenges suggests that we are most likely screwed. As an engineer, it's quite clear to me that the purely technical problems of climate change and energy are challenging but probably solvable -- we are still within the window, technically. But the commitment and the decision to devote the resources required to solve the problem - that seems unlikely.

But not impossible. The thing about the future is that it is hard to predict, and there are always uncertainties. It is also true historically that our culture can dramatically transform itself in a relatively short period of time, when the conditions are right. And these transformations are hard to see before hand -- they look just like every other fringe movement, until they aren't any more.

So hope lives within these uncertainties, and within this knowledge of what is possible. It isn't a lot. It's certainly not a high probability. But it's something. And most days, it's enough.

Posted by Brent Eubanks | April 22, 2010 7:51 PM

Yes, Hamilton's book is excellent. Yet perhaps it does offer an excruciatingly tiny glimmer of hope...

...that we have emitted HALF the total carbon required to push us over 2 degrees. (p.194 of my copy)

Hamilton expects us to polish off the other half sometime between 2030 and 2050, depending on rates of consumption and population growth.

The sound of inevitability is therefore largely about leaders' apparent reluctance to face the music and enact rapid decarbonisation. But in theory, we could.

Posted by Tom Chambers | April 23, 2010 3:11 AM

I like your use of the expression "traumatic dislocation". If we're lucky, the Great Three Leaders will borrow that for next week's televised debate.

Posted by Andrew Harmsworth | April 23, 2010 8:22 AM

I've often wondered how you manage to stay so positive with such tremendous opposition and the disheartening blinkers to arguments such as population and the 'sixth great extinction'.

But conscience keeps us going, we can't stop doing, or fighting for morality and the right course because others pop the Ignorital pill.

Even if the worst happens homo sapiens needs to be led to change and maybe the utopia that is science fiction (fantasy) today will be reality in the next century.

Maybe the fact that there is no quick fix is good for our species long-term wellbeing if somewhat terrifying in the short-term.

Posted by Vipul Patel | April 27, 2010 11:39 PM

This is an ever-present challenge, in my experience. Is the flash of insight about the seriousness of our situation so fierce as to be blinding? And what do you do next?

I have always find that denial (in the sense of compartmentalising the horror so that I can get on with my day) a very helpful thing. I guess it had to evolve alongside consciousness, so our species could go on in the face of individual mortality.

But it gets to the point when that seems too much of a cop out, and not helpful to the people we're working with - as consultants, campaigners, trainers, facilitators, policy makers, change makers of all kinds.

Great that you mention Joanna Macy's work. AMED's Sustainable Development Network is running a half-day workshop in London based on the Work that Reconnects. AMED is the Association of Management Education and Development, a not-for-profit networking and learning organisation (so I hope you'll forgive the ad). See here if you're interested http://www.amed.org.uk/events/work-that-reconnects

Penny

Posted by Penny Walker | May 5, 2010 8:16 AM

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