Living in an unstable world: Existential climate risk and the dangers of climate nihilism
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Climate news is never great these days. But the recent report released by the United Nations’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on the impact of 1.5 degrees (Celsius) of global warming made for particularly grim reading.
The report was commissioned by world leaders at the Paris climate conference COP21 in 2015 to examine the impacts of a 1.5 degree warmer world vs a 2.0 degree warmer world.
According to the report, we have 10–12 years left to reverse greenhouse gas emissions trends and completely transform the world’s economies in order to prevent devastating impacts.
Coming from a typically cautious organisational body, often afraid to be perceived by politicians and the public as ‘alarmist’, these conclusions are even more significant, as described in a recent opinion piece by the New York Times;
“When a cautious, science-based and largely apolitical group like the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says the world must utterly transform its energy systems in the next decade or risk ecological and social disaster, attention must be paid.”
The future, here and now
In an increasingly likely unstable future, we will have to grapple with climate induced challenges on an unprecedented scale.
Moreover, what we once thought of as impacts to be felt only by future generations, occurring over timescales of a century, will begin to come into effect well within the lifetime of most of Earth’s population, around 2040, and at a lower temperature.
Impacts like floods, mass migration, refugee crises, food insecurity, water insecurity, extreme heatwaves, super storms and more will hit us on a vast and unprecedented scale much sooner than previously anticipated.
This makes climate change your issue, as well as mine. None of us can pretend it won’t affect us anymore.
Given that the report is describing the potentially devastating impacts of a 1.5 degree temperature rise, and that the commitments given at COP21 in Paris only get us as low as a 3 degree warmer world by 2100, this is truly terrifying.
10–12 years is not a length of time that anyone should be comfortable with to address such a substantial existential threat to humanity. Yet this is precisely the situation in which we find ourselves.
Tipping points and existential climate risk
Contrary to popular belief, climate scientists and the IPCC in particular, often err on the side of caution and tend to downplay risk to avoid appearing alarmist. This often means that the true nature of the existential risk associated with the climatic changes we are observing is not effectively communicated.
Some of this understated existential risk derives from tipping points. A tipping point is a threshold in the climate system which, when exceeded, causes the system to become unstable. Tipping points exist largely because our climate system is fundamentally chaotic and can exhibit non-linear behaviour.
‘Global warming’ as a term, does a terrible job at explaining and emphasising this fact. A better term would be ‘global climate destabilisation’. By adding more heat and energy to our atmosphere and our oceans, we make them more unstable. Our emissions are shifting climatic norms way out towards the extreme and pushing the climate system closer towards a number of tipping points.
Examples of known tipping points include:
- Increased temperatures accelerating the melting of Arctic permafrost, releasing large amounts of methane (a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide) into the atmosphere, further accelerating warming.
- Increased temperatures and drought accelerating forest dieback, releasing the carbon currently stored in huge areas of forest such as the Amazon, further accelerating warming.
- The melting of polar ice caps that would no longer reflect light and heat away from the sun, further accelerating warming. Additionally, this tipping point could induce significant sea level rise, flooding many of the world’s most populous coastal cities and causing a climate refugee crisis.
There are significant unknowns regarding these tipping points, particularly how they might interact and reinforce each other once the climate system is pushed beyond its steady state and into an unstable, non linear state.
Furthermore, despite the growing body of evidence that suggests that the impacts associated with tipping points increase disproportionately as average temperatures increase from 1 to 2 to 3 degrees, we have consistently neglected in our political negotiations and scientific communications to consider the high-end, high-risk scenarios which would result in abrupt and devastating changes to the climate system.
The dangers of climate nihilism
Thinking about these impacts and their implications can be incredibly overwhelming. Many people are overcome with an overwhelming sense of helplessness and loss. These feelings cannot, and must not be dismissed. What they represent is profound loss, an acknowledgement of what is at stake and how precious, valuable, and ultimately fragile human life on Earth really is.
Some fall into a defeatist state of climate nihilism and subscribe to a position that no action can make any difference, so why bother trying. It can be an attractive position because of the certainty it promises at a time where so much about our world and our lives is uncertain.
Climate nihilism is a self fulfilling proposition. If we were to adopt it as a worldview, our fate would be sealed. What is still within the realms of probability would become certain.
The commitments made in Paris, which many countries are failing to meet, have us on track for a 3 degree warmer world. Giving up means locking in at least 3 degrees of warming, the consequences of which are almost unimaginable. We therefore have no choice but to limit global warming as much as possible, every degree of warming avoided matters because there is no safe level of global warming.
So whilst it may be tempting to adopt a nihilistic or defeatist attitude towards the issue of climate change, particularly in light of reports such as these, to do so is profoundly irresponsible, short sighted and morally corrupt.
Scaling collective action and social movements
There’s no getting around it. Solving this problem is going to require institutional level change and global cooperation on an unprecedented scale.
We simply have to give up our global addiction to fossil fuels, which means no new coal fired power stations, and an accelerated and just transition to renewables based energy systems. This also implies that industrialised countries have to assist developing countries in leapfrogging our own outdated, polluting means of development.
On a more personal level, there’s lots you can do to help (like eating less meat, divesting your finances, catching public transport, and switching to a renewable energy provider). But whilst these individual actions are important, they should not be enough to placate us that “we’ve done our bit”.
We need to build an organise social movements on a scale never seen before which means getting politically active and aware, voting based on climate, and holding our governments and corporations accountable for their inaction. It requires leaning in, coming together, hope and determination.
The cost of acting is high. The cost of inaction is unimaginable. Hope is not enough if it is not accompanied by meaningful action. We no longer have any choice but to act.
The truth is, we never did.
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