Get Ready for Tough Talk and Civil Disobedience

 

George Monbiot writes that, after the failure of COP 26, we're in a fight for our lives.

Now it’s a straight fight for survival. The Glasgow Climate Pact, for all its restrained and diplomatic language, looks like a suicide pact. After so many squandered years of denial, distraction and delay, it’s too late for incremental change. A fair chance of preventing more than 1.5C of heating means cutting greenhouse gas emissions by about 7% every year: faster than they fell in 2020, at the height of the pandemic.

...Without massive and immediate change, we face the possibility of cascading environmental collapse, as Earth systems pass critical thresholds and flip into new and hostile states.

So does this mean we might as well give up? It does not. For just as the complex natural systems on which our lives depend can flip suddenly from one state to another, so can the systems that humans have created. Our social and economic structures share characteristics with the Earth systems on which we depend. They have self-reinforcing properties – that stabilise them within a particular range of stress, but destabilise them when external pressure becomes too great. Like natural systems, if they are driven past their tipping points, they can flip with astonishing speed. Our last, best hope is to use those dynamics to our advantage, triggering what scientists call “cascading regime shifts”.

The End is Nigh, Really?

With a succession of "atmospheric rivers" washing over coastal B.C., including another that's arriving today; a tornado - a tornado for Jeebus' sake - hitting Vancouver - in November; the still mainly pristine Salish Sea now serving a diet rich in herring and anchovies to some 500 newly arrived humpback whales; heat domes setting Canadian temperature records on three consecutive days before erasing an entire town by wildfire; every week seems to bring another reminder that we're neck deep in climate change impacts that we barely understand and are powerless to curb, even if our government had a mind to do that.

We appear to have arrived at the doorstep of what the Mora climate lab at the University of Hawaii calls "climate departure."

“Go back in your life to think about the hottest, most traumatic event you have experienced,” Dr. Mora said in an interview. “What we’re saying is that very soon, that event is going to become the norm.”

Monbiot and others have given up on these UN climate summits.  When you've had 26 bouts of COP and emissions are still going up it's hard not to be cynical.  The delegates and host countries pursue incremental change, sometimes so incremental it's not noticeable. Theirs is a linear process, a regime of words not deeds.

Climate change tipping points, however, are not linear. They come on fast, much faster than modern civilization can cope with, and they come in a cascade, with one tipping point sometimes triggering others, tipping the climate into new, harsher states. Can you think of one nation, one government anywhere that's geared up for non-linear, abrupt climate change?

Climate change impacts are not linear but almost nothing has been in the post-war era. Since 1950 we've been living in what's called the Great Acceleration.  Check that link, follow the graphs that chart everything from population growth, GDP, greenhouse gas emissions, on and on and on. Climate change might not be linear but neither are we, humanity. To a large extent we are authors of our own misfortune.

You may think of me as a purveyor of doom and gloom. Trust me, I don't hold a candle to that group. There's a reason I haven't been citing their research and their conclusions. Some of them claim we could be extinct by 2030.

Now more credible voices are joining the extinction chorus. One of them is Arctic News. Yesterday it published a report asking if we might be gone in just a year or two. The thrust of the "it's worse than you know" item is that, dire as its reports might be, the IPCC got it wrong.

One of the largest threats is seafloor methane and despite repeated warning from some of the best experts in the field, the IPCC simply waves away this threat.

Is there anything to this? I don't know. I can't say there isn't. We know there is a methane bomb building in the Arctic from both seabed methane and the thawing of the vast permafrost. I have tried, without success, to find any reference to it in the IPCC summaries. At this point does it really matter?

Back to George Monbiot. His argument is that we need to achieve a critical mass, 20 per cent of the public should do it, that will be enough to force the political caste's hand.  That sounds feasible in Canada where the difference between winner and loser can be just a few percentage at the ballot box. Imagine if Justin was told, "if you don't change we'll get someone who will."

There is a whiff of desperation in Monbiot's plea and, while he argues for a holistic approach, see if you can spot what he's leaving out:

The end of fossil fuels will not, by itself, prevent the extinction crisis, the deforestation crisis, the soils crisis, the freshwater crisis, the consumption crisis, the waste crisis; the crisis of smashing and grabbing, accumulating and discarding that will destroy our prospects and much of the rest of life on Earth. So we also need to use the properties of complex systems to trigger another shift: political change.

Full points if you guessed overpopulation. That's a place Monbiot refuses to go. It is an illogic that deflates his central argument. Oh well, I suppose his heart's in the right place.

h/t NPoV