An overheated planet
In addition to its political and economic upheaval, 2020 was also tied for the hottest year on record. With an unprecedented 30-named storms in the Atlantic hurricane season, and more than 10 million acres lost to forest fires in the Western United States, the last twelve months have underscored the depth of the climate emergency and our indifference to an impending catastrophe.
In his book “The Uninhabitable Earth” David Wallace-Wells cites reams of evidence that our ignorance and inaction are compounding the problem. The book begins, memorably, “It is worse, much worse, than you think.” Then, after dismissing several comforting delusions – that the crisis is remote, slow, isolated, or that rich countries can shield themselves from its worst consequences – Wallace-Wells notes that we are living through a mass extinction – the fifth on record – mainly due to the presence of “a third more carbon in the atmosphere than at any point in the last 800,000 years—perhaps in as long as 15 million years.” That should concern us more because the last time the earth looked like this: “There were no humans [and the] oceans were more than a hundred feet higher.”
Significantly, 2020 was hotter despite the disruptions caused by Covid-19. The breathing space that our economic lull offered the natural world showed that faltering ecosystems could recover if our more destructive behaviours were paused, even briefly. And yet, even with the Biden administration resolved to rejoin the Paris agreement and to centre America’s economic recovery on renewable energy, the scale of the global challenge remains daunting.
In “The New Climate War” the scientist Michael Mann warns that the modest measures which used to be taken for progress will no longer suffice. He argues that the coordinated effort necessary to avoid the worst outcomes has been deliberately hijacked by “fossil fuel companies, right-wing plutocrats and oil-funded governments.” The only hope for a genuine course correction lies in “recognizing and defeating the tactics now being used by inactivists as they continue to wage war” against the evidence of our accelerating doom.
Wallace-Wells writes that the magnitude of the crisis should permit us “to plausibly conjure into being a system of true international cooperation.” Lamentably, as 2020 vividly demonstrated, we seem determined to move in the opposite direction: “recoiling into nationalistic corners and retreating from collective responsibility and from each other.” If navel-gazing and complacency lead us to disaster, Wallace-Wells argues that this will be “because we have chosen that punishment—collectively walking down a path of suicide. If we avert it, it will be because we have chosen to walk a different path, and endure.”
Advances in wind and solar technology and the prospect of nuclear fusion reactions may decrease the rate at which the planet is warming, but only concerted action on fossil fuels, pollution and deforestation can avert a disaster. In many ways the Covid pandemic has been a foretaste of what lies in store in an overheated and overcrowded planet. What happens next is our call.