From Portside Culture <[email protected]>
Subject How We Can Avert Climate Apocalypse
Date October 24, 2019 12:00 AM
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[Here is a book that talks about the link between climate change
and armed conflict. As reviewer Horgan points out: "The global
cooperation we need to solve global warming can also help us solve
war."] [[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

HOW WE CAN AVERT CLIMATE APOCALYPSE  
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John Horgan
September 23, 2019
Scientific American
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_ Here is a book that talks about the link between climate change and
armed conflict. As reviewer Horgan points out: "The global cooperation
we need to solve global warming can also help us solve war." _

,

 

_The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming_
By David Wallace-Wells
Penguin Random House
ISBN: 9780525576709

I pontificate about lots of things on this blog. Just in the last few
months I’ve blathered about self-consciousness
[[link removed]], genealogical
anxiety
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science and mathematics
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the flaws of psychiatry
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But I’ve begun thinking it’s pointless, and irresponsible, to
write about anything but climate change. Did passengers on the
Titanic chitchat about Freud
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their ship sank?

My daughter’s outlook is even grimmer than mine. She has the soul of
a social-justice warrior, but she worries that climate change will
destroy civilization before we can bring about meaningful social
change. When I asked my students if they shared my daughter’s view,
many raised their hands, all looked uneasy.

I know how they feel. Climate apocalypse is like death. The larger it
looms, the less I want to think about it. I haven’t written about
the topic since last December, and then only glancingly, to express
despair [[link removed]].
Recently, however, I’ve made an effort to face global warming
squarely. One goad is the protests of Greta Thunberg
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other young activists. Another is _The Uninhabitable Earth: Life
After Warming_, by journalist David Wallace-Wells, the most compelling
book I’ve read on our potentially hellish future. It is a true
horror story that, paradoxically, left me feeling more hopeful about
the future.

Wallace-Wells limns doom with literary flair. But what makes him
especially persuasive is that he came to the topic of climate change
late, and reluctantly. He was never particularly green. He likes meat,
doesn’t like camping. He cares much more about humanity than about
“nature,” whatever that is. He was once skeptical of “the
Environmental left,” but after delving into climate change a few
years ago he got scared. “Alarmist” is a derogatory term, but
Wallace-Wells embraces it. “I am alarmed,” he says, and we should
be too. “It is worse, much worse, than you think.”

Early on, Wallace-Wells rattles off the myths with which we downplay
climate change: “that wealth can be a shield against the ravages of
warming; that the burning of fossil fuels is the price of continued
economic growth; that growth, and the technology that produces it,
will allow us to engineer our way out of environmental disaster; that
there is any analogue to the scale or scope of this threat, in the
long span of human history, that might give us confidence in staring
it down.”

Wallace-Wells demolishes these and other falsehoods with brutal facts.
250 million years ago a surge of carbon dioxide triggered the Great
Permian Extinction, which “ended with all but a sliver of life on
Earth dead.” We are now pumping carbon into the atmosphere ten times
faster than the volcanic eruptions that precipitated that ancient
cataclysm. Although the fossil fuel era began two centuries ago, more
than half of our carbon emissions have occurred in the last three
decades, after James Hansen and other scientists began warning of our
actions' consequences.

Our emissions are already wreaking havoc. Since 1980, annual storms
have doubled, coastal floods have quadrupled, life-threatening heat
waves have surged fifty-fold. The melt rate of Antarctic ice has
tripled just in the last decade. As many as 2.1 billion people already
lack safe drinking water, and shortages are growing more severe.
Things will get worse, how much depends on us. 

It would take a “spectacular coincidence of bad choices and bad
luck” to make Earth truly uninhabitable any time soon, Wallace-Wells
says. But “if the next thirty years of industrial activity trace the
same upward arc as the last thirty years have, whole regions will
become unlivable by any standard we have today as soon as the end of
the century.” Even with a “radical reduction” of emissions,
temperatures will probably rise two degrees Celsius and sea levels two
meters by the end of the century.

Wallace-Wells packs bad news into chapters titled “Heat Death,”
“Hunger,” Drowning,” ”Wildfire,” “Dying Oceans,”
“Unbreathable Air,” “Economic Collapse” and “Climate
Conflict.” The latter explores the likelihood that migrations and
other climate consequences will trigger wars over water and other
resources. I have written critically
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this prophecy, which I fear might become self-fulfilling, but the
analysis of Wallace-Wells strikes me as awfully credible.

He emphasizes that wars exacerbate scarcity as well as vice versa.
This is just one of many negative feedback effects that can compound
the effects of climate change. Others include the shrinkage of the ice
caps, which make the poles darker and hence more heat-absorbent; the
melting of permafrost, which might release frozen methane; and the
burning of forests. “Higher temperatures," Wallace-Wells writes,
"means more forest fires means fewer trees means less carbon
absorption, means more carbon in the atmosphere, means a hotter planet
still—and so on.”

Despair is understandable, given the fractious state of politics in
the U.S. and elsewhere. We are “recoiling into nationalistic corners
and retreating from collective responsibility,” Wallace-Wells points
out, precisely when we most need global cooperation. But noting that
he and his wife just had a child, he rejects “climate nihilism.”
The scale of climate change itself should be empowering. “If humans
are responsible for the problem,” he writes, “they must be capable
of undoing it.” He insists that we have all the tools we need,
technological and political, to save ourselves. We just need the will
to use them.

This can-do rhetoric reminds me of a 1963 speech
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which President John Kennedy envisioned a world without war. “Our
problems are manmade,” JFK declared, “therefore they can be solved
by man.” And that brings me to my hopeful vision. Over the past
decade I have written much more about war than about climate change,
because I believe that “war is our most urgent problem
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After reading _Uninhabitable Earth_, I would amend that claim. I now
see war and climate change as equally urgent.

They are also intertwined, and not just because warming might trigger
resource wars. As the antiwar group World Beyond War
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spends about $2 trillion a year on arms and armies, money that would
go far toward countering climate change. The U.S. accounts for more
than a third of this spending, and it is the world’s biggest arms
innovator, manufacturer and dealer. The American military is also the
world’s single biggest consumer of fossil fuels.

I’d love to see more acknowledgement of these linkages by green
activists like Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein and politicians like
Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. By calling for reductions
in military spending as well as fossil-fuel emissions, they might
catalyze a powerful, _positive_ feedback loop. The global
cooperation we need to solve global warming can also help us solve
war. Imagine what we could do with just half the resources dedicated
to “defense”! A green antiwar movement would not only avert the
worst catastrophes depicted by Wallace-Wells. It would also create a
more peaceful, prosperous, just world, in which we can talk, without
guilt, about things other than climate change.

John Horgan directs the Center for Science Writings at the Stevens
Institute of Technology. His books include _The End of Science_, _The
End of War_ and _Mind-Body Problems_, available for free at
mindbodyproblems.com.

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