Navigating the Minefield of Short-Termism

 

She's a Canadian-born Christian evangelist. She's married to an evangelist preacher. They live in Texas. Getting a picture in your mind?

Katharine Hayhoe is also a leading and outspoken climate scientist. She can reconcile climate science with Christian dogma by arguing that neither her god nor yours (if you have one) is responsible for this climate crisis and the power that is destroying our environment is us. Hayhoe says we have to get past this, 'oh, they'll think of something' mentality.

The world cannot adapt its way out of the climate crisis, and counting on adaptation to limit damage is no substitute for urgently cutting greenhouse gases, a leading climate scientist has warned.

Katharine Hayhoe, chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy in the US and professor at Texas Tech University, said the world was heading for dangers unseen in the 10,000 years of human civilisation, and efforts to make the world more resilient were needed but by themselves could not soften the impact enough.


“People do not understand the magnitude of what is going on,” she said. “This will be greater than anything we have ever seen in the past. This will be unprecedented. Every living thing will be affected.”

While countries can start to adapt to some of the impacts, for instance with seawalls and flood barriers, and by making their infrastructure more resilient to extreme weather, if global heating is allowed to continue then the world will rapidly reach a point beyond what can be adapted to.

“If we continue with business-as-usual greenhouse gas emissions, there is no adaptation that is possible. You just can’t,” she said, in an interview with the Guardian.

These impacts would be felt across the world, she warned. “Our infrastructure, worth trillions of dollars, built over decades, was built for a planet that no longer exists,” she said. Changing that infrastructure would cost further trillions, so allowing greenhouse gas emissions to continue to grow would mean ever-rising impacts and costs.

The whole of modern life was at stake, she added. “Human civilisation is based on the assumption of a stable climate,” she said. “But we are moving far beyond the stable range.”

“This is an unprecedented experiment with the climate. The reality is that we will not have anything left that we value, if we do not address the climate crisis.”

In lieu of posting, I've used the last two weeks to take stock of where we've come and where we seem to be headed. I realize I can come across as a Cassandra but I have the same hopes as most. I hope that the science is wrong, that it's missing something. I hope that we still have time to change course before we arrive at our Thelma & Louise moment. I also realize that these hopes are flights of fancy.

I recently asked a climate scientist at the University of Hawaii  for his views on the global effort to avert climate catastrophe. He replied that DiCaprio's latest film, 'Don't Look Up' captures the moment. I thought he was kidding. He wasn't.

UN Secretary-General, Antonio Gutterres warns that our leaders are committing "self harm." - climate change, it's not just for the next generation any more.

Last week, author and military correspondent, Michael Klare, looked at the newly launched Cold War that pits the US and NATO against Russia and China and opined that it could derail essential cooperation on the environment for another two decades - time we obviously haven't got.

George Soros lamented that the war in Ukraine, even if it doesn't result in an outright major power shooting war has derailed action on existential threats such as the climate emergency.

“Other issues that concern all of humanity -- fighting pandemics and climate change, avoiding nuclear war, maintaining global institutions -- have had to take a back seat to that struggle,” Soros, 91, said Tuesday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “That’s why I say our civilization may not survive.”

In The Guardian's Sunday paper, the Observer, put it plainly: "...international environmental action is in clear need of reinvigoration. Hopes this might happen were raised after the Glasgow Cop26 meeting. Omicron, the fuel crisis and the Ukraine war put paid to those notions, however."

At one point is seemed that world leaders might unite to ensure that humanity had at least a 50/50 chance of survival but that would have required, among many other things, a halving of greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 leading to a net-carbon zero world by 2050. The International Energy Agency warns that our dwindling chances demand that there be no new fossil energy projects from hereon in. Meanwhile our supposedly "green" government proceeds apace with its insane bitumen pipeline and greenlights the Bay du Nord seabed oilfield development in the waters off Newfoundland.

If I was a betting man I would put my money on Katharine Hayhoe, Camilo Mora, George Soros and Michael Klare.  Factor in environmental degradation, overpopulation, massively excessive levels of consumption, the accelerating loss of biodiversity, heating and acidification of our oceans and more atop a rapidly worsening global climate, where would you put your bet?