The climate change metaphor
To write about climate change or global warming, as a concept that encompasses and affects almost all areas of life, requires delimiting a scope or an approach beforehand. It is simply too big to grasp otherwise. That is why, before diving in through this series, I feel compelled to pick-up my words where I left them in my previous article and to continue exploring the roots of climate change, yet not from a scientific standpoint, but from a conceptual one. To be able to think and to act on this overwhelming phenomenon, with or without putting a label on it, we need, as humans, to understand it. If we are going to assume the responsibility that we have on its acceleration, we must first visualize it and correctly comprehend it. That is, of course, if we manage to overcome the inherent difficulty of talking about something that we are not able to see or touch.
The complexity of a concept
Climate change is something so big, so complex and so powerful that just imagining it poses a mental challenge, just like it is to imagine the universe. Even if we have a clear idea about whether it affects us or how it does so, climate effects are everywhere, but we only experience them through phases or moments. Climate change consists of many individual elements and it cannot be reduced to them, but only as a whole (think of a heat wave, a flood or a hurricane). We do not perceive climate change as it is, we do not touch it; it absolutely defies the definition of what a thing is; we only see the raindrops, the dry land, the snow, at a specific time. But the fact that we cannot perceive it as a whole does not mean that it does not exist or that the correlation is there.
Timothy Morton, a modern environmental philosopher, coined a term that can be used to define climate change: a “hyperobject”. A word that allows us to describe something that transcends our time, our life itself, and whose dimension will encompass beyond what we can think, compute or even live. Climate change is everywhere in our field of vision, like a proverbial whale that has swallowed us, so we cannot differentiate it until, perhaps, it’s too late or we are too close to it. But it is there.
In this regard, science is more accurate and honest when it comes to understanding climate change, because it is based on measurable data. As humanity, only a few centuries ago, we believed that the earth was flat only because it was declared by certain groups or elites. Today, thanks to scientific data we know with a certainty higher than 95 percent that we caused global warming. We do not need to rely on an empty phrase pronounced in the street or published in a pamphlet. Irrefutable data is available. However, even if we have an incredible amount of information about climate change, which is, again, something that we cannot directly experience as a whole, we still only perceive those of its impacts and effects that are close enough to us.
To see, to touch, to perceive in order to connect the dots
Understanding climate change, as a concept, also gives us the freedom to disdain the label as such and to focus on the unusual climatic events that populate these last few years. Climate change as a term was coined in 1975 along with its twin brother ‘global warming’ by Wallace Broecker, the eminent American scientist that recently passed. Knowing how people often get stuck in terminology discussions, it is not surprising that the controversy still arises today. Other groups, even scientists, think that it is better to turn it around and, instead of talking about ‘fighting’ climate change, we must find a ‘pro’ formula, in favor of the planet, the climate or the environment, just as it was done with the ‘anti/pro’ dichotomy that rose about abortion back in the sixties. Morton, in his book, points out that “[…] ‘climate change’ is a substitute for ‘global warming’ in the same way that ‘cultural change’ would be a substitute for ‘Renaissance’” thus inviting people to admit things like ‘the climate has always changed’, negating the underlying problem. I believe that, even if we must not dodge the discussion about the name or the label of the problem, it should not paralyze us and therefore we should focus on its magnitude, its effects and how we respond.
Last February, the remote Novaya Zemlya archipelago in northern Russia declared a state of emergency in the face of an unprecedented invasion by more than fifty polar bears. The polar bears, who approached the human settlements of the island while searching for food, used to have a pattern of migration from south to north that coincided with the solidity of the ice season. Last winter, however, the ice cover and its thickness have been lower than usual or even nonexistent, as it happened in the Russian island, hindering the bear’s possibilities of hunting and forcing them to find sustenance inland, in the garbage and near villages and towns. It is an ironclad scientific conclusion that the Arctic ice’s reduction and thinning is directly related to the acceleration of climate change and the increase in global temperature.
Polar bears are the visualization of global warming as a metaphor and, also, an icon of the fight against it, as a threatened and vulnerable species as it is the fragile ecosystem where this species dwells. Unlike the hyperobject of climate change as a multidimensional concept, we can see polar bears, because we are familiarized with them. We immediately grasp the problems they are experiencing, because we understand the need to hunt and the feeling of hunger linked to the pure instinct of survival, and we can almost connect the dots in their entirety to imagine what climate change is, even if we do not call it that, and the footprints it leaves for us to perceive.
It is easier, then, to feel empathy -especially considering that what is happening to the polar bears could happen to us as well- and, of course, we can worry about them, we can accept our responsibility and we can call for action. Just the same way we can talk about unexpected hurricanes, rising sea levels or suffocating heat: as visible, perceivable happenings.
Our alteration potential
As per some scientific consensus, we live in the geological era denominated Anthropocene, and that could be defined as the period of time in which the human being, as an inhabitant of the planet, started to test and prove its overwhelming potential and its power as a geophysical force, that is, its capacity to alter the planet. The Anthropocene’s origin can be determined at different times in our history, with some degree of confidence: for some it is the invention of the steam engine back in 1784 and the subsequent industrial revolution, and for others it is when we began to cause the mass extinction of cohabitant species of flora and fauna. Perhaps the greatest demonstration of human strength to alter the world in physical terms is the nuclear test of the Manhattan Project in 1945, the first atomic detonation.
The Anthropocene is also the time in which human beings caused climate change through our actions and omissions. Thanks to using fossil fuels, we have accelerated the natural cycles of carbon, an element as intrinsic to life on Earth as it is to climate, unearthing coal, oil and gas and converting it into carbon dioxide emissions. It is rather pointless now to look back and to think about what could have been, had we not altered those natural deposits: probably, we would not have global warming today, nor economic progress nor we’d be at a constant technology peak.
Yet to study the past allows some analogy with today’s world. We know, thanks to geological history, that there have been several iterations of climatic changes, happening hundreds, thousands and millions of years ago. During the Paleocene (56 million years ago), global temperatures rose from 5 to 8 degrees Celsius, a circumstance that triggered a radical change in the living conditions of the planet, to the point of no return that the warmer climate caused erosion and floods that released more carbon dioxide from the earth into the atmosphere. The geological lesson of a specific paper on this phenomenon was that, to take the planet beyond the equilibrium point, increasing the temperature beyond a tipping point, starts some chain reactions have the potential to accelerate even more the warming and the liberation of greenhouse gases.
For better or for worse, as human beings we are part of the colossal hyperobject that is climate change: we are elements inside the object. To develop an ecological awareness about it is just the next step in our natural evolution. It will allow us to accept the role we have as key element in it and, at the same time, the potential that we have to alter the planet and its conditions. Our plight is not about looking for something new or that isn’t there, but about channeling that energy, that overwhelming force that is already there facing us towards a disaster and its cumulative effect, and pushing it towards the solution instead.
