Impacts

Climate change threatens our dreams—will we choose to protect ourselves and our families?

I can’t ever tell whether our eyes are open or shut—I don’t know if people see the flames. I fear that our eyes are both open and shut—a grim possibility. We “see” what’s happening but there’s no machinery within us that’s able to understand what fire means.

I’d imagine that the inability to take seriously what lies outside the present moment has harmed the mental health of informed kids who have—to their horror—learned that their parents’ eyes already are open. And that there won’t be any panic or urgency as the flames close in.

A Smidgen of Panic

This summer should’ve demonstrated to everyone the horrifying reality of the climate crisis—I can’t understand the lack of panic and urgency. A 24 August 2023 Guardian piece says: “Barcelona is handing out water and caps to homeless people and France has recorded its highest overnight temperature since records began, as firefighters in Greece grapple with major wildfires in another brutal European heatwave that has pushed temperatures past 43C (109F) in some locations”; the “combination of heat and drought has put all of Spain on high alert for wildfires”; heat and dryness have affected Spain’s grape harvests and olive harvests; “Spain is the world’s largest producer of olive oil but last year’s crop was down by 50% and this year’s is expected to be as bad”; regarding Greece, “firefighters continued to battle strong winds and hot, dry conditions to try to bring dozens of wildfires under control near the border with Turkey and on the fringes of Athens”; and regarding southern France, 17 fire departments “remained on red alert for extreme heat after several southern towns and cities hit their highest recorded temperatures”.

A 25 August 2023 Foreign Affairs piece says: the “28th Conference of the Parties (COP28) under the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change” is scheduled to start in late November; with “this summer’s catastrophes fresh in people’s minds, COP28 could prove a turning point for adaptation efforts”; never “has the destructive force of climate change revealed itself so widely across the globe, and the explosion of climate-fueled disasters has given billions of people a firsthand understanding of their ferocity—and impact”; efforts “to contain the warming of the planet should always take center stage at international climate negotiations, including COP28”; “negotiators must expand the stage to include adaptation and make sure that” mitigation and adaptation truly go hand in hand; and the “impacts of a changing climate are already here, and they are devastating communities around the world”.

I think that the emotions of panic and anger can be harmful as well as helpful—humans have evolved emotions that cause us to take action. Mark Gongloff was a managing editor of Fortune’s website, a Wall Street Journal reporter, and a Wall Street Journal editor. And he writes in a 16 June 2023 piece: current “policies and practices have the world on pace to hit nearly 3C of warming by the end of the century”; the “world must slash emissions by 43% by 2030 in order to hold warming to 1.5C, by one estimate”; “our species evolved panic as a kind of superpower to avoid being eaten”; in “certain circumstances, and in measured doses, a little existential dread can still be helpful”; “if we temporarily hit 1.5C of warming this year, it will still be theoretically possible to avoid long-term warming beyond that level and all the catastrophic consequences that would come with it”; “first we must kick our fossil-fuel addiction and stop spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere”; and “judging by how little the world’s policymakers seem to be interested in taking such steps, perhaps just a smidgen of panic might be helpful”.

Magical Bubbles

I found very moving the 23 August 2023 NYT piece in which Serge Schmemann reports—from his cottage in Quebec—about climate change. He writes: regarding Canada’s wildfires, “thousands have been forced to evacuate homes in endangered areas”; only “last week, wildfires approaching West Kelowna, a city in British Columbia, and Yellowknife, the capital of the Northwest Territories, forced evacuation of homes in both cities, and British Columbia declared a state of emergency”; on “Lac Labelle, we were never in direct danger, but the acrid smoke and the unfamiliar drumbeat of crisis from the vast Canadian wilderness hit home”; “the eerie orange haze had invaded the zone in which my family had always thought we could take refuge”; regarding climate change, this was not another report of something happening somewhere far away; and “this was a horizon-to-horizon pall over us, rising from infernos across the great Canadian north”.

I think that a crucial observation—regarding the climate crisis—is that each individual will only take action when they cease to see themselves as somehow encased in a magical protective bubble that doesn’t exist. But where is the point—for each person—where the magical bubble disappears? There’s a big psychological difference between reading about faraway disasters and experiencing something at your cottage—Schmemann writes that “the eerie orange haze had invaded the zone in which my family had always thought we could take refuge”.

I think that each person must come to see themselves as not being somehow encased —regarding climate action, I think that each of us will delay if we each imagine ourselves as somehow encased.

Schmemann writes in the piece: with “the melting Arctic to their north and the immensity of their northern wilderness, Canadians are not strangers to climate anxiety”; “as The Globe and Mail reported, ‘Canada’s summer of fire and smoke’ has still come as a profound shock to the nation, ‘materially and psychologically, as people across the country report a sense of dread about the disaster unfolding just out of sight, and what it portends for the future’”; “as the summer unfolded, it became evident that it’s not just smoke, and not just Canada”; this “has been the summer from climate hell all across Earth, when it ceased being possible to escape or deny what we have done to our planet and ourselves”; here “on the lake, things have quieted down, and the air is mostly clear”; and “it’s hard, very hard, to look out on the familiar lake and forests the way we used to, before the sun was reduced to a murky red dot in an orange sky and an orange pall descended on the children playing on the beach”.

Canada’s Future

A 2023 Maclean’s piece says: there “was a time, not that long ago, when some people imagined Canada would ride out climate change with relative ease”; Canadian agriculture would benefit from longer growing seasons; an ice-free Northwest Passage would open up opportunities; those “visions have faded, as the scale of disorder we’re facing looms larger”; a “recent study by Stanford University scientists, using machine learning to analyze climate models, projected two degrees” of global warming by mid-century even if emissions decrease quickly; what “follows is a portrait of Canada in a world warmed by two degrees”; and this “is not what our country will look like if the world fails to reduce emissions—this is our future even if we do”.

The piece says: in “2005, Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht first coined the term solastalgia to describe the feeling of being homesick while still at home”; it’s “that feeling of loss and melancholia that kicks in as your home environment changes before your eyes, and it will come to define the deep emotional and psychological distress that more Canadians will confront as global warming drives their climate past recognition”; there will be hotter and harder-to-contain fires that will burn indefinitely; last “year, scientists at the Canadian Forest Service and the University of Alberta projected that the annual footprint of charred land in Canada will more than double by 2050 and increase four-fold before century’s end”; “those fires will be fundamentally different—more beastly and less controllable—than the fires we were previously accustomed to”; research has shown that smoke exposure correlates with greater risk when it comes to (A) cancer, (B) cardiovascular disease, and (C) respiratory problems; smoke exposure’s “most unsettling impact may be the lifelong toll it takes on the youngest among us”; research “out of Stanford University in 2019 found that children exposed to wildfire smoke in California had changes in the expression of a gene vital” to immune-system functioning; “in Canada, some 30,000 children who were in utero during B.C.’s 2017 wildfire season were later studied”; those “whose mothers lived in areas with the worst smoke exposure were likelier to be born smaller and pre-term”; they were also sicker; people “talk about climate change as a future threat—a bill that will be collected as our children enter adulthood”; and “for increasing numbers of our kids, its destructive effects have already indelibly marked their growing and vulnerable bodies”.

The piece says: “disasters both sudden (fire, flood, storms) and slow (drought, coastal erosion, sea-level rise)” will displace record numbers of Canadians; a “permanent class of the internally displaced will require care, shelter”, and other resources; and a “survey of 3,000 high school students evacuated from wildfire-ravaged Fort McMurray, Alberta, in 2016 found that, even 18 months later, almost half met the criteria for diagnoses of PTSD, depression, anxiety”, or substance abuse.

I remember seeing—when it was published—a 15 August 2019 Financial Post piece that talked about the benefits that climate change would bring to Canada. The piece says: according “to Moody’s Analytics, Canada will benefit from climate change”; assuming “a one-degree Celsius temperature rise, Moody’s calculates that our economy would be unaffected in 2048”; a “rise of 2.4 degrees would increase GDP by 0.1 per cent and four degrees would boost it by 0.3 per cent”; and “Canada is imposing burdensome costs and regulations to try to prevent what for us would be beneficial warming”.

I think that it makes no sense to suggest that X amount of global warming will benefit Canada—or some other country—when X would mean apocalyptic outcomes for ultra-vulnerable countries like India. First, I think that watching the world burn would be utterly dystopian—I can’t imagine the psychological toll that living in a burning world would exact on the people in the country that was insulating itself. And second, I don’t think that any country would—in a burning and interconnected world—be able to insulate itself from the endless reverberations of a world aflame.

A 11 July 2023 New Yorker piece says: regarding Canada, “the nation has an absolute front-row seat to the crisis”; “wildfires have already burned more of the country this year than in any full year on record”; “Canadian cities have had moments this summer when their air quality was the worst in the world”; “before the fire season started, an economic analysis from the Canadian Climate Institute suggested that climate change could cut the nation’s economic growth in half by 2025”; by “2050, half a million jobs would be lost, ‘mostly from excessive heat that lowers labor productivity and causes premature death’”; “polling earlier this year found that seventy-five per cent of Canadians were anxious about climate change”; “twenty-one per cent of the population was having fewer or no children as a result”; “Justin Trudeau’s government had been making noises about a plan to dramatically cut emissions”; “the government quickly began to back down after a meeting in June with officials in the oil-rich province of Alberta”; and the “task for the government is to make it appear that as much progress as possible is being made (to appease the fifth of Canadians too worried to have children) while causing as few political problems as possible with the industry”.

Large-Scale Changes

I want to underscore the point that we’ll incur large-scale risk if we fail to keep anthropogenic warming below certain thresholds—regarding the climate system, there are big things that can break. A 2023 preprint says: regarding the climate system, tipping elements are large-scale subsystems—of the Earth—“that may transgress critical thresholds (tipping points) under ongoing global warming”; regarding critical thresholds, transgression may have substantial impacts on (1) the biosphere and (2) human societies; and as “anthropogenic global warming continues, tipping elements are at risk of crossing critical thresholds”.

I find the rapid warming of the Arctic very troubling—this warming poses dangers far beyond the Arctic. An 11 August 2022 NYT piece says: the “rapid warming of the Arctic, a definitive sign of climate change, is occurring even faster than previously described, researchers in Finland said Thursday”; one “result of rapid Arctic warming is faster melting of” Greenland’s ice sheet; this faster melting adds to sea-level rise; and regarding rapid Arctic warming, “the impacts extend far beyond the Arctic, reaching down to influence weather” in North America and elsewhere. And a 6 June 2023 NYT piece says that the “first summer on record that melts practically all of the Arctic’s” sea “ice could occur as early as the 2030s, according to a new scientific study”.

I think that it’s very disturbing to imagine what would happen if the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) collapsed—a 25 July 2023 Nature Communications article is titled “Warning of a forthcoming collapse of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation”. Regarding the AMOC’s potential collapse, I recommend a YouTube video that PBS Digital Studios made:

I think that we should do everything possible to protect the AMOC against collapse—I find it hard to get my head around the level of large-scale risk that we’re incurring as we conduct what seems to me to be a shameful, dangerous, and reckless experiment.

Ineffective Carrots

I want to spotlight the extraordinary danger that the Republican Party poses when it comes to the climate crisis. A 4 August 2023 NYT piece says: during “a summer of scorching heat that has broken records and forced Americans to confront the reality of climate change, conservatives are laying the groundwork for a future Republican administration that would dismantle efforts to slow global warming”; the “move is part of a sweeping strategy dubbed Project 2025”; the plan calls for eliminating greenhouse-gas regulations regarding cars, oil wells, gas wells, and power plants; the plan calls for dismantling almost every clean-energy program in the federal government; the plan calls for boosting fossil-fuel production; and the “New York Times asked the leading Republican presidential candidates whether they support the Project 2025 strategy but none of the campaigns responded”.

I don’t know what can be done to incentivize the GOP to support decarbonization. Regarding incentives, Republicans don’t seem to respond to carrots—the GOP seems to just want to give the liberals the finger.

A 7 August 2023 NYT piece says: “technological progress in renewable energy has made it possible to envisage major reductions in emissions at little or no cost in terms of economic growth and living standards”; “in 2009, when Democrats tried but failed to take significant climate action, their policy proposals consisted mainly of sticks”; in “2022, when the Biden administration finally succeeded in passing a major climate bill, it consisted almost entirely of carrots”; “thanks to the revolution in renewable technology, energy experts believe that this all-gain-no-pain approach will have major effects in reducing” greenhouse-gas emissions; “an important part of President Biden’s climate strategy is the idea that” renewable-energy “investments, which have been soaring since his legislation passed, will give many businesses and communities a stake in continuing the green transition”; and “such rational if self-interested considerations won’t do much to persuade people who believe that green energy is a conspiracy against the American way of life”.

The piece says: climate denial has “become a front in the culture wars, with right-wingers rejecting the science in part because they dislike science in general and opposing action against emissions out of visceral opposition to anything liberals support”; “this cultural dimension of climate arguments has emerged at the worst possible moment—a moment when both the extreme danger from unchecked emissions and the path toward slashing those emissions are clearer than ever”; David Brooks correctly “argued that many Republicans dispute the reality of climate change and push for fossil fuels as a way to ‘offend the elites’”; look “at the hysterical reaction to potential regulations on gas stoves”; and “the culture war has become a major problem for climate action—a problem we really, really don’t need right now”.

I suppose that you could—regarding the GOP—ask two questions. First, who exactly sets the culture-war agenda? And second, will the people who set the culture-war agenda decide—at some point—that decarbonization must be reframed as something positive within Republican ideology?

We don’t have to condemn young people to a horrible fate. And we don’t have to destroy our dreams. We can choose to take action—we can choose life and reject suicidal inaction.