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THE UNINHABITABLE EARTH comes out next week (amazon.com/Uninhabitable-…). It's not about worst-case warming scenarios but the range of very likely outcomes between 2° and 4°. That range almost certainly contains our future, and yet we have a very hard time taking it seriously. (1/x)
That's why I wrote this, an argument for the wisdom in contemplating terrifying possible futures, even unlikely ones, though the likely ones are terrifying enough: nytimes.com/2019/02/16/opi…
The logic for that is, to me, overwhelming, but in the article I lay out (depending on how you count) six big arguments.
The first is, alarmism is true. It is not hysterical to be scared about climate change; when it comes to global warming, the facts themselves are hysterical. Responding responsibly means taking them seriously.
The second is, looking squarely at what the science predicts for us between 2° and 4° helps us better conceptualize the range of likely outcomes. If we build our expectations for the future off a baseline of today's climate, we will be woefully unprepared.
(Without some extraordinary technological intervention, we won't be able to stay below 2° and so anchoring our expectations by looking out the window at a world just 1.1° warmer is deeply misleading. ..
...4° is where we are headed without a change of course, and we should do everything we can to understand what that world looks like, so that we can do everything we can to avoid getting there.)
The third argument is, it remains obvious to me that, even with attitudes about climate moving very fast, complacency is a much more pervasive problem than fatalism, with many more people not concerned enough about climate than are on the brink of giving up—or "too concerned."
I believe that fear about what is possible is a very powerful motivating force for shaking complacency—I know that personally, because it has shaken mine.
The fourth argument is related: we know that fear is effective from history. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring was called alarmist and hyperbolic and over-the-top. It single-handedly led to the ban on DDT, and played a major role in creating the EPA.
The UN says that to avert catastrophic warming we need to mobilize, globally, like we did during World War II. That war was not waged on hope alone.
The fifth argument is that we should engage in catastrophic thinking because all of our psychological reflexes and emotional impulses run in the other direction—towards disbelief about very bad outcomes.
That we have such a hard time believing the scientific predictions about what the world would look like at 2° or 3° or 4°—that is not a reason to be skeptical about the predictions but an argument to take them very, very seriously.
Climate change won't look away from us, so we better not look away from it.
Right after this piece was published, a few climate scientists I admire enormously took issue with some of its rhetoric, though they also endorsed its substance.
It's not time to panic, they said, but time to take radical, responsible action.
The state of the planet isn't an argument for alarmism, but for realism, because the facts are alarming enough.
I don't disagree with either point, in substance. Whatever you call it, whatever terms you use, the upshot is clear: dramatically disruptive action is necessary to avert a terrifying rundown of climate horrors.
Which brings me to the last argument for catastrophic thinking I lay out in the essay: fear can produce an incredible sense of urgency, which is what we need.
It shouldn't be the only rhetorical tool climate advocates use in mobilizing activity, but we also shouldn't leave that tool on the table as we lament, endlessly, the public's lack of motivation or our politician's disastrous indifference on the preeminent issue of our time.
And that's my argument for the wisdom of catastrophic thinking, in tweetstorm form. But for those of you who've made it this far, it is not the content of the book, which explores all the ways climate change will transform human life and society in the century to come.
Humans are resilient, and adaptive, as is human civilization. And while climate change is a profound, even existential threat to both the human animal and the societies we've built, I think it's a safe bet that we endure these climate horrors.
The question is how, and in what shape, transformed in what ways. That is the subject of my book: not what climate change is, or what it threatens, but what it will mean, for all of us. amazon.com/Uninhabitable-…
Thanks for reading. (x/x)
